The Fiction Garage (6): Finito!
...err, for now anyhow
I have finally1 gotten over my obsession with this whole project: to wit, shepherding my fiction of the past 30-some years to public availability.2
As you may recall from a couple months ago, I was frantically trying to get two anthologies of short stories into readable, downloadable eBook form. No sooner had I done that, when (as I hadn’t anticipated) several people contacted me about their preference for Real Books: books printed on paper, with dog-earable page corners and no requirement to be read on an electronic device.
I knew it was possible. Here, for instance, you can see a partial screen capture of a page at Amazon’s “Kindle Desktop Publishing” (KDP) site, referring to an eBook I started messing about with some years ago:
See all those non-highlighted buttons? Yeah. If I wanted, I could even go to a hardcover edition. That, as the expression goes, Is Not Gonna Be Happening. But for these two anthologies, I thought, well, why not give paperback editions a try?
I won’t belabor you with details of that process. There was a lot more work involved in getting the formatting just right for a physical book, vs. its simpler electronic counterpart. (For instance: getting page numbers on every page except in the front matter (title page, copyright page, etc.). For instance: adding “drop caps” to the first paragraph in every story. For instance: having different page headers — book title, or author’s name — on right and left pages, respectively… except on the first page of a new story. And so on.)
It also appalled me how many typos and… well, let’s call them miswordings I’d overlooked in editing the electronic editions. So in that sense, after making those corrections, the printed things are the definitive ones. (I will, too, eventually go back and bring the electronic editions up to snuff.)
Finally, I will say that designing a printed book cover turned out to be much more of an adventure than I’d expected. Basically, you have to design the front cover and the back cover and the book’s spine as a single big image. (For some reason I’d never even considered that the spine would need to vary depending on how many physical pages the book’s content includes. In retrospect: duh.) And I had to come up with some kind of at least vaguely clever text for the back cover, too boot.
Here’s the end product, for Left-Handed Inventions:
The red-tablecloth photo which opens this post marks a particularly dramatic phase of the project. Those aren’t finished books: they’re “author’s proofs” — dress rehearsals, as it were: the very last chance to Get It Right before the book goes to press. It’s a valuable phase, too, because errors can jump right out at you on a physical page even when you fancied you’d edited the bejeezus out of the electronic thing. I found more than enough examples of that to satisfy me: the extra delay was worth it.
Anyhow, I’ve got drafts of some other posts in the Outbox, so to speak, and am looking forward to getting back into Substack again — on topics other than this one!
Although maybe only temporarily…
Note careful sidestepping of the term “publication” and its ilk. It feels artificial to me — wrong — to say that I’ve now PUBLISHED these two books. I can’t escape using the traditional verbiage, and I’ve never begrudged any other self-published author’s use of the term. Even so…