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Funny how you can read the same thing over and over again, re-edit it for the umpteenth time and suddenly have an epiphany – well, fancy term for something that happened when the latest text-to-read runthrough reached a particular conversation. I won’t say what deficiency it highlighted, at risk of major spoiler territory, but suffice to say I’ve been adding new material to a couple of chapters much later in the book to address it. The need for the extra work has bogged down the progress of the edit somewhat, and also raised the word count again when I had succeeded it getting it below 160,000, but without those changes there would be a major believability gap.

Phew! Does make you worry and think “What else might I have missed?” I’m hoping the professional editor I want to engage will catch anything else, though I haven’t yet approached my shortlist as the ‘final’ edit is taking longer with these additions, and I don’t know exactly when I’ll finish.

As an added incentive, I’m doing CampNaNoWriMo this month, with an initial goal of 35 hours editing, though the plan is to exceed that.

As light relief, I wrote another 200 word short story for the latest competition on one of the  Goodreads forums. This time the brief was to include five particular words chosen by last time’s winners. I’ll post that on my short shorts page once the result is announced later this month.

I’ve been reading parts of David Gaughran‘s book “Let’s Get Digital” which has lots of interesting info and also links to other articles on the internet, some by him and some by other writers. I may have to slightly revise my ebook formatting process in the light of some of this advice, mainly along the lines of swapping out e.g. emdashes in favour of substituting the html codes for same. Will need to consider that as soon as I have any time.

Anyway, to summarise the latest goals and progress:

1. Produce a fourth e-book version and play it through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Part way through chapter 29 of the latest.
2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Pretty happy with the process I’ve documented, apart from the continuing issue with the title page image which has the text too small possibly because of making it responsive and sizing for the screen (not including actual figures for width and height). Need to try again with text title/author name and the logo image and see if they still split across ‘pages’. Need to create a short dummy ebook to find out if the trial attempt at a transparent graphic works, as none of the preview tools are any use for that.
3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the revised shortlist of pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.
4. Finalise the back of book text and also remember to add info to the copyright/dedication page such as the book cover designer’s and editor’s credits.
5. Consider if further tweaks are needed to ebook conversion process in light of advice in David Gaughran’s book and the linked articles.

Those nice people at ROW80 are posting updates on a blog ‘linky’ list again – see here. Alternatively, you can check the Facebook group here.