Ever since that Saturday morning a long time ago when I started writing what would become “Elements of Change,” writing and self-publishing a book has been an adventure in learning. Back then, I didn’t know how to properly outline a story or how to show and not tell. Much less, how to format a book, choose fonts, and deal with advertising.
Turns out, when writing a book, there’s so much more than just writing the book. It wasn’t the smoothest ride in discovering that, either. But, here’s the reality: I want to be a writer. I want to be an author. I don’t aspire to be, as my friend Caleb put it, the next Stoker or Shelley. I just want to be me. I think that I have stories that are worth being told and are done best through this particular medium. I wouldn't mind maybe doing a small tour someday, but that's a pipe dream for if this somehow ever becomes more than just a hobby.
In order to get there, in order for people to take me seriously, I have to take myself seriously.
That’s why in the past several weeks, I’ve upped my game even further. There were a couple of things that have been plaguing these books:
Minor proofing errors: lots of small things that are just downright distracting while reading. They lingered, even after copy-editing. To fix this, I hired a proofreader to finally smooth out those last bits.
Mystery font issue: turns out that the font I was using, Bahnschrift, is not supported by Adobe. This was solved by switching to a nearly-identical font that was built into the Procreate, the program that I use to create the covers (not painting them, I can't do that; that's all still Morgan).
eBook formatting: I was never really happy with how the eBook version looked. All the fonts were off and none of my formatting from the paperback carried over. So I went through and used Kindle Create to completely redo the formatting for that version. I'm hoping that I can get it updated for current owners, but we'll see.
Book covers: Aligning with my font issue, I also redid the covers so that one single font was used both inside and out. They now look much better and I'm so happy with the final results
Character Bios: These are actually more of an outstanding to-do that I finally knocked off this past weekend. I had asked Morgan to create portraits of the main characters so that I could create small character cards for each. The art has been done for months, along with the information for the cards, but I needed to sit down a hammer them out. These are now live.
I want for these books to be the best that they can be. I don't do this just for readers, but also for me. While they may never be perfect, I'll be damned if I'm not going to try my hardest to get them as close as possible.
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