It Suddenly Feels Real

I made a goal to have my Christmas story collection published by November 1st of this year...I think I said that in a previous post, but I'm not certain, so that may be my announcement of it right now. Hopefully, I can get it out even earlier, but certainly by November 1st. That way you'll have the whole holiday season to buy yourself a copy.

I have the manuscript put together for the most part, but it will certainly require some tweaks to make it appear the way it's supposed to. I made an account on Amazon to publish it with, and was looking at the various file formats I could export the manuscript in to give to Amazon, and tried some of them out. One of them was an EPUB, and I exported a test file in that format.

When I clicked the file, it opened in the Mac app called Books. It opened up for me to read, and I felt like I had grown a foot taller immediately. This was my book, but suddenly it actually looked like a book. Instead of that word processor one-page-after-another format that I am used to looking at my work with, it looked like a book. It was as if they took a book off my shelf, and made a flattened digital rendition of it...except this was my book, not one off the shelf.

Here's a screen cap of what it looked like.

I know, it's my book not yours, so it surely doesn't get you excited like me, but this makes it feel real. I've never seen my manuscript in this form, but holy crap it looks amazing!

Now I can't wait to get it posted for sale. I'm sure there will be dozens of issues getting it ready to go. For example, this is what my title page looked like on the EPUB.

That's supposed to be the title page, the copyright page, and the table of contents page, which should all be separate pages, but instead the program crushed them all together like that. I don't even know if that's something I need to fix or not. EPUB is not the only file type that I can use. I could just export it as a Word DOC file, and use that, which may be the easier and better way to go. So, we'll see just how painful or painless this can be.

The hardest part of my goal will be getting the audio version ready in time. It is still just July, so I've definitely got time.

Dont Worry About It Bob GIFfrom Dont Worry About It GIFs

But I have many stories to read and edit before November. I plan on having it available in all the options that Amazon offers, eBook, audiobook, and paperback...I think I might even be able to offer hardback (which is my own preferred format. I'll have to get one of my own of those).

Then, once I get that one all finished, I'll move on to the next collection that is also basically ready to go, my first regular (non-Christmas) short story collection.