Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, July 2, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the Third*

* Alternatively: On Writing & Storytelling: Grappling with Revisions and Uploads to Kindle Direct Publishing

Hi there! It’s Sunday, July 2, 2023, and here in Lithia, Florida, it’s late morning. It’s also – no surprise there – a hot early summer day, and the second day of the long (and for me, dull and somewhat lonely) Fourth of July weekend. Currently, the temperature is 86°F/30°C under mostly sunny conditions, but the feels-like temperature is already 90°F/32°C. I can’t begin to speculate how torrid it will be once we reach the forecast high of 96°F/35°C, but it’s going to feel like at least the low 100s/40s. Ugh.

As you know, yesterday I spent several hours grappling with the tedious and enervating process of uploading revisions for both the Kindle and paperback editions of my novella, Reunion: A Story. I am not going to delve into the nitty-gritty details of the process, but I will say that it’s not an easy or pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Too many things went sideways, mostly involving the cover design (too few options and no way to really customize the images that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) offers in its collection of stock illustrations) and the preferred page size format.

The latter issue does not affect the Kindle e-book, not one bit. It does, however, matter a great deal when it comes to the print edition, since the preferred size for paperbacks on KDP is 6 inches by 9 inches, and the default setting on page size on Word is 8.5 X 11 (letter size). I keep on forgetting that – I don’t self-publish books on a regular basis, and I can’t remember all the hoops that self-published authors must jump through when using KDP to create print books.

See, this is why I am being extremely careful with the pre-publication phases of Reunion: Coda. Yes, it is a pain in the ass to sometimes take a day, sometimes even a week going backward to evaluate chapters I’ve already worked on and fixing things now rather than pushing forward with the narrative and then doing all the revisions.

But trust me on this when I say to you that unless you have an editor/proofreader to help you with the revisions, it’s far better to spend time on making changes – both large and small – now. It will – if you do your job well – reduce the number of mistakes (typos, inconsistencies in your story, and other headaches) in your published story, and it will result in a much better reading experience for the folks that buy your book.

I don’t think that I’m done with the revisions, either for Reunion or Reunion: Coda. I just saw another mistake (a minor formatting error) that I missed in earlier passes, and of course, KDP’s software did not catch it because it’s not a “spellchecker” kind of blooper. (It’s a “typesetting” error where I forgot to add italics to a book title I mention in the novella.)  So, of course, this means that I need to wait several hours before I can fix anything since I’ve already had to fix a glaring mistake in the new cover design for the paperback edition. (The paperback edition is always the most difficult to fix. So. Damn. Annoying.)

It’s going to take a while before I can make any new changes to the Kindle and paperback editions, so I’m going to try and make part of this miserably hot July Sunday a fun day.