Drudgery of Formatting

Tuesday morning, my beta reader/grammar maven sent GNOME back with her comments and edits.  This is the final FINAL edit of this story.  It's slow going because I decided to verify my formatting at the same time. 

When you take the step to self-pub, you have to do it all yourself (or pay someone).  Now, don't let the thought of formatting your work overwhelm you.  There are a few tricks of the trade, BUT it is very slow and tedious to check all your sentences to make certain you don't double space, have your quotation marks going the wrong direction, and place only one space AFTER every period, plus I didn't want too many paragraph returns between chapters since this can leave blank pages on e-readers.

I must say when my beta reader returned GNOME, she sent me an email along with the manuscript.  The one sentence that stood out was, "I read half the book last night, and frankly, I didn't want to stop, but I was SO exhausted I knew I was starting to read for just pleasure and I wasn't catching edits, so I shut it down for the night."

THIS was why I decided to take the step to self-publish. 

THIS was why I started writing middle grade.

I want to share my stories. I want to write stories that pull readers from their reality and immerse them into my fantasy. Editors and agents aren't looking for my type of story.  That's my reality. It's too light and not dark end-of-the-world type of story.

Is self-pubbing for everyone?  My response is still NO. 

This year, I intend to publish ALL my finished Goblin's Apprentice stories.  So far, that's three novels in the series and three short stories.  I also intend to write three more short stories.  Think about it.  The stories are written, but need editing, blurbs and covers= time and $$$.

Which means none of them are ready to go up without some work!

At the end of GNOME, I will place a teaser of the next book in the series, The Fast and the FAERIEous, but that doesn't mean FAERIE is ready to publish.  It needs edits-slicing and dicing-beta reads to catch the stupid mistakes (missing words, wrong tense, confusing sentences, etc). 

*sigh* and the cycle begins again.

I do have one regret by self-publishing.

I don't have any books to sign.  I won't get the chance to meet my readers at a book signing, but I'll take that trade off if I get kids to read my quirky stories.  And readers are more than welcome to chat with me on Facebook, or email me a note.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent again.

--and now, I need to figure out how to market my stories . . .

No excuse, just tired. 

Later, Peeps!