A week ago, I decided to self-publish my first novel.
It's been written for years. I finished it well over a decade ago. I almost lost the files at one point, because I no longer had the program it was originally written in. I've sent it to publishers and received rejection slips, but I still like it, and I want to see it published. I don't expect to sell a zillion copies, but I want it to be available.
Self-publishing wasn't an option when I finished my book all those years ago. Too expensive, for one thing, but also at the time too embarrassing. But now? Self-publishing is big stuff, and even well-known authors do it. Print-on-demand means that I won't have to invest a lot of money in hundreds or thousands of copies. I admit I've seen recent self-published stuff with covers, layout, and content that screamed "amateur," and even the best self-published books I've recently seen could have used a good editor. But, of course, my book will not have those problems, because knowing the pitfalls, I will avoid them. Says here.
So what have I done in the past week?
1) Looked into publishing options, and decided to go with CreateSpace. When I say "looked into options," I mean "read several recent online articles about self-publishing." I picked CreateSpace because the costs were low, the connection to Amazon was appealing, and I know someone who published with them. Moving right along...
2) Picked a title for my book (Just Like Magic), paper color (cream), interior color (black and white), and trim size (5.25" x 8"). These are all choices one has to make when setting up a book account with CreateSpace, but they can be changed later if desired. Some of them would be a real pain to change, though, especially trim size, which I picked by measuring several books I own in the same genre as my book (young adult novel) and going with a small, but standard, size. (I work in a library, and I've noticed that young adult novels tend to be small.) And my book isn't very long, only about 35,000 words, so the smaller the trim size, the fatter the book will be. This is good in my case; my book won't look like a pamphlet.
3) Downloaded a template from CreateSpace for my book interior in my trim size. This template is a very handy thing, a sort of dummy book into which I can slot my own material. Paste Chapter One into the Chapter one slot! Chapter Two, ditto! I merrily pasted in all my chapters, changed the spacing from double to single space, and changed the justification from left to fully justified. There were a couple of chapters in which I hadn't previously fixed the formatting errors from when I recovered the files from the old word processing program. Oh well, that only took half-an-hour or so to fix....
4) Changed the font, after much "research" (see "looking into options," above). My original manuscript was in Courier, a monotype font which I liked because it reminded me of typewriters, but I picked Garamond for the book because I wanted a serif font, I liked the way it looked, it was highly recommended, and I had it in my word processor, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac. At about this point I was ready to squee, looking at my book interior. It looked Good! It looked Real! Oooooh....
5) Made more formatting choices. Did you know that the first paragraphs of chapters in published books are not indented? Me neither, but as I researched this in my home library, I found it was true. First paragraphs start flush left. Sometimes they have what are called drop caps--large capital letters for the first letter of the paragraph which drop down into the second and maybe third lines also. I rejected this (wasn't sure how to do it) (note--turns out it's super easy, as I discovered after a little "research"), but I did make the first letters one size bigger. I also discovered that many books use small caps for the first few words of the first line of each chapter, and I used that, too. Such fun!
6) Changed the font size and line spacing. I settled on 14-point for my font size in order to keep the number of characters in each line to no more than sixty--a figure I had found in a book about web design (Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug) which I read for my job. I noticed, however, that even with the larger font, my pages had more lines per page than the books I was using as examples. So I changed my line spacing, making it 16-point, slightly larger than standard, which reduced the number of lines on a page to 29.
7) Edited as I went along. If I saw some awkward wording as I was working on a page, I changed it. I also marked a couple of sections which needed more work.
8) Read through the first chapter carefully and started creating a style guide (a list of names, places, times, and things in the book) to ensure the book's continuity. Realized that one of the character's names was too similar to another character's name (Lucy and Lydia). Changed Lydia to Anna (oh, the wonders of the "replace" function in the Edit menu!)
9) Went crazy with replacing, and replaced all the old bad double quotation marks (another artifact of my upgrading from the old word processing program) with good quotation marks. (What makes a quotation mark bad or good? The ones in my manuscript were straight, not curving right or left. When I replaced them with Garamond quotation marks, they turned into lovely curving quotation marks.) Also replaced single quotation marks. No, I don't know why these changes didn't happen automatically when I originally changed my font to Garamond, but they didn't. Also changed my hyphens, which were looking like little disjointed dashes, and had inconsistent spacing. "Replace" did it all!
My thoughts about all I've done this past week? For one, it was a lot of fun! I enjoy the formatting as well as the writing. But there's a lot left to do: I need to thoroughly edit the whole thing, as well as make such formatting decisions as page headers, title font and title page design, and whether or where to have acknowledgments.
Looking to the future, I worry a bit about the cover (I guess I need to do a bit more "research.") And I haven't thought much about marketing, but I will. I also need to get a tax ID number from the IRS.
It'll be fun. Look for another post next week!
