Putting out a book is not easy!

It is amazing some of the stuff you go through in putting out a new book!

Just getting the manuscript right can be an ordeal. There are an amazing number of mistakes that can slip by me as I write. Especially since I use a "modified hunt and peck" system to write. I am blessed with two wonderful "editors," who catch most everything and especially some embarrassing mistakes. In the book about to come out - The Branding of Otis Henry - I even had a character to die, only to have him suddenly alive a few pages later! But even these fine people miss things that I find later. And after all of that, I recently flipped through one of my books and spotted a missing quotation mark!

Then there is the cover. Just getting the dpi's right can be a learning curve, and then which format (pdf, jpeg, etc.) can be daunting as you learn that each can look great in your Microsoft Word document, but that somehow between my computer and the upload to the publisher, things can go awry and get real frustrating.  Just today, as I looked at a proof copy of "Branding," I caught that there was an error that slipped by both me and my good friend who is learning with me and helping to build the covers. We finally found which format works for the covers, but it requires waiting until the final page count is completed before it can be finalized.

By the way, The Branding of Otis Henry  actually comes before Prodigal's Blood (formerly Battle for Yesterday). It gives more of Otis Henry's story. And here's something I want you to know. When I got the first proof copy, I realized I had messed up on the margins and there was too much white space. So I changed the margins and, in the process, shortened the book from 220 pages to 196 pages, which then resulted in having to re-do the cover again! I had a few moments where I then thought the book might be too thin, and wondered about adding to it to bring the page numbers up. Then, I said to myself....no! The story is done! It is what it is! Even Louis L'Amour had some shorter ones!

But I love to write now. I am bursting with new ideas and wrote 15 pages this morning on my newest, Gideon's Rest. I had to push myself to keep going, and am pleased with the result!