I am very fortunate that I have a copy-editor as a friend. I insist that she charge me fairly, but it's very handy that I can have her just look at sections when I need it. Usually when you hire a copy-editor you "hand" then the text and they go through the whole thing. I don't even know how to do that.
I work in Google Docs which is great for collaborative work. Once I finished the first draft I had her start working on it. I a terrible about commas, so she spent a lot of time adding them in and flagging certain sections that we should talk about.
This went on for days and days which is normal and we had many conversations about certain sections. Some of the problem sections I chose to leave because I liked them and honestly didn't know how to deal with them. (I later did deal with them.)
Weeks of back and for and back again. It was a perfect way to work and I can't fathom making it work in one go. If I had to do it that way they a lot of the text would not be as good.
After a lot of tweaking, conversations, and lunches, it was finally ready to go to the proofreader.
Friday, January 11, 2019
The Cover Design
Well it's looking like they were not able to get ellenclary.com unfortunately though I need to double check. It's likely I will use ellenclary.org. ellenclary.com is just sitting there parked on the internet.
A few things I need to blog about on the publishing process. One big back and forth was the cover design. I filled out some information on what I wanted it to look like. One huge requirement of mine is that the cover had to be drawn and not based on stock photography. This is science fiction where you almost never see photographs. It's always drawings. After some internal debate at the publisher they asked me if it would be ok to split the cost of hiring an illustrator as doing so would put us over budget. I readily agreed once I saw the website of the illustrator. He's really good and his name is Ben Perini.
Then I gave them a description of what I had in mind and I even took photos of myself in scenes I have envisioned. I forgot to tell them that the character is a little slimmer than me and taller, so we had to go through that revision but the scene he came up with was good.
A few things I didn't realize. The scene has to be a night time scene. I said: "But they usually work during the day." The coordinator assured me that if it were during the day it would just look like a woman taking her dog on a walk. Oh. Ok, so forget verisimilitude. That works.
Then there were assumptions that wouldn't work for the world I created. She was carrying a flashlight. What? No, if anything it would be a headlamp. Then she was carrying a leash. No that's not right. Telepathic dogs. They usually didn't use leashes except for show. Then the shoes didn't look right, oh and stop tucking in the pants. This isn't the military. I'm still not thrilled with the text, but I decided after some tweaks that I needed to stop and just let them work.
After lots of back and forth suddenly there was a cover that I liked. It was actually very cool to see. It looked like an actual book.
A few things I need to blog about on the publishing process. One big back and forth was the cover design. I filled out some information on what I wanted it to look like. One huge requirement of mine is that the cover had to be drawn and not based on stock photography. This is science fiction where you almost never see photographs. It's always drawings. After some internal debate at the publisher they asked me if it would be ok to split the cost of hiring an illustrator as doing so would put us over budget. I readily agreed once I saw the website of the illustrator. He's really good and his name is Ben Perini.
Then I gave them a description of what I had in mind and I even took photos of myself in scenes I have envisioned. I forgot to tell them that the character is a little slimmer than me and taller, so we had to go through that revision but the scene he came up with was good.
A few things I didn't realize. The scene has to be a night time scene. I said: "But they usually work during the day." The coordinator assured me that if it were during the day it would just look like a woman taking her dog on a walk. Oh. Ok, so forget verisimilitude. That works.
Then there were assumptions that wouldn't work for the world I created. She was carrying a flashlight. What? No, if anything it would be a headlamp. Then she was carrying a leash. No that's not right. Telepathic dogs. They usually didn't use leashes except for show. Then the shoes didn't look right, oh and stop tucking in the pants. This isn't the military. I'm still not thrilled with the text, but I decided after some tweaks that I needed to stop and just let them work.
After lots of back and forth suddenly there was a cover that I liked. It was actually very cool to see. It looked like an actual book.
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