This week in book land I feel like have accomplished a lot but I know I still have a small mountain to climb.

After reading some more of the tutorials on the book publishing site, I realized I needed to re-format my page size. I had been using a page size of 8 ½ x 11 (in Word), but the actual book pages are going to be 6 x 9. Once I adjusted the page size, my page count jumped from just over 400 pages to almost 800. Yikes! And I hadn’t even finished adding the letters for December or any of the appendixes. At that point, I decreased the font size from 13 point to 12 and the book still was over 700 pages. I went back to the CreateSpace website to try and find any information on suggested font sizes. Most books don’t inform the reader about font type or style so it was really hard for me to judge what size fonts are in a typical book. I finally found a “book template” on CreateSpace which used an 11 point font. I went back through my manuscript again and changed everything to 11 point. The book is now just over 600 pages, and will probably have a finished length of around 650.

I finished adding all the letters to the manuscript this week. Yay! I am now in the process of my “first edit.” I am going back through all the letters, checking typos, adding more footnotes, and deciding illustrations (photographs and documents). I am reformatting the letters back to their original indents and removing the page notations, for example “[page 1],” that I had on the blog. I feel that while they may have worked on the blog, in the book they didn’t. The letters flow better.  My current plan is to go through this first edit stage and then print off a copy of the whole manuscript. From this copy I will do another round of editing as well as begin to build my index. Although I will have an opportunity to purchase a “proof” copy of the book before it goes on sale, I want to make sure that the book is ready before I upload it. I see a lot of editing in my future.

This week, I was back at my regular school site and I twisted the arm of one of my colleagues to be an editor for me. I gave her my first two chapters, the Introduction and Who Were Roscoe and Gladys?. Because she is not overly familiar with the ins and outs of my family, she is a great one for asking questions about things that don’t make sense in my narrative regarding my grandparents. Because I know the story so well, it is sometimes hard to remember that not everyone knows all the details. I’ve also started thinking about who I might want to include in my Acknowledgements page. Many people have encouraged me and supported me over the last (almost) two years.

Another major victory for myself this week…I FINALLY got Word to format two different page headers. The left page header has the book title Dear Mother, Love Daddy, while the right page header has the current chapter. I manged to do this while keeping the page numbering intact (at the page bottom) and having no page heading on the first page of the chapter. Of course, I have now probably cursed myself…..

This to do this week:

Continue first edit
Begin mini bios

Deborah Sweeney, © 2014.
Post originally found: https://genealogylady.net/2014/08/16/the-book-progress-report-august-16/