My second book is being printed!

Cover of My Second Book

I have now approved the final version of  “A Ticket to Zululand – The Place of the People of Heaven”, and it has gone to the printers.

As expected, I did experience some difficulties during the publishing process despite the fact that I was paying for this service, but eventually we arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.

The main hitch was that the Author Consultant I dealt with appeared to believe that everyone was an amateur and should be treated like an idiot.  Some of the advice I was given was incredibly inept, ie to make proofreading easier change the whole book to a larger font.  Surely it would be easier to use the percentage zoom feature.  Changing the font could result in a lot of extra work as there could be sections of the book in different fonts, the layout would change and page breaks would be in different positions.  Then you would have the extra work involved in changing it all back again to the correct font, and checking that it was laid out correctly.  Incredible advice.

Also, I did have problems understanding American accents when messages were left on my answerphone.

As I had experienced several hitches when I submitted my first book to the same publishers as a Word document, allowed them to format it and then eventually had to do it myself and supply it in a pdf format, this time I put in the first submission as a pdf.

However, the publishers then tried to persuade me to submit as a Word document because they did not like the font style.

I changed the font style myself throughout the book, and then resubmitted another pdf file.  This was accepted, and the following day I received it all back to proofread; they had produced a wonderful cover using the photograph I supplied, the back cover, title pages and copyright page, plus the whole book was in a format ready to print.

I was really impressed with the speed (one day’s work) and the layout of the cover pages despite the fact that my instructions to use a similar style to my previous book had been ignored.

Then I was encouraged to carry out a final proofreading.

It really is amazing that despite how many times you proofread, and bearing in mind that my husband proofread it as well several times, you can still find errors.  I spent a day proofreading over 200 pages, and found several errors that I corrected as I went along.  Then I resubmitted the pdf.

This was not accepted.  They wanted me to complete a Galley Modification Form in order to supply information on page number, paragraph number, line number, previous wording and new wording for each error.  Despite the fact that I had made the changes, they wanted to make these changes themselves, which would be time-consuming for them, and necessitate me proofreading again and probably finding further issues with the knock-on effect of layout problems that I had corrected as I made amendments.

After filling in four A4 pages of a Galley Modification Form (very time-consuming) and complaining via the Customer Care Survey, my final pdf was accepted, together with the requested changes to the covers and copyright page.

Now I am looking forward to receiving my first copy of the printed book.

As soon as I am given information on availability, I’ll let you know just in case you would like to purchase a copy.