After WAY TOO MANY final edits, the manuscript is being uploaded to the printer for the final time, and as soon as they approve it in the next few days I’ll get my order in for the books. I had gotten the physical proofs last week just before I went to vend at an event over the weekend, but there were a few things I wanted to change before ordering hundreds of copies of this thing.
Now, as I have mentioned, I use Microsoft Word for book layout because I have neither the time nor the money to learn to use a proper layout program. 95% of the time it’s perfectly serviceable–until you put a ton of pictures in. Anyone who’s ever tried putting pictures in a Word document knows the pain of “I’m just gonna nudge this picture over a few pixels WAIT WHY IS IT NOW TWO PAGES FURTHER DOWN THE MANUSCRIPT?” So making any change in a chapter that is photo-heavy means that I have to go back and fine tune everything else that was inconvenienced by the process. As you can imagine, this was very frustrating and there was a lot of swearing involved.
But it’s about as good as it’s going to get, so while this isn’t a New York Big Five Publisher-quality layout job, the pictures are more or less where they ought to be and I caught as many typos as I could. Also, the print quality on the pictures isn’t as good as I’d like, and I had to print the book in black and white since color would have been EXPENSIVE, so I’ll be putting color versions of the pics on the website by the time the book is in your hands.
I’m probably being more self-critical than I ought to be, and I’m sure you all will like the book just fine. I’ll keep you all posted on shipping and the like, and I really, really appreciate your patience as I juggle this book project with about eleventy billion other things going on in my professional life right now. Cheers 🙂