A few days ago I announced my upcoming novel. I’ve written it, I’ve formatted it, I’ve generated the files, I’ve printed it out.

I could upload it to KDP today.

So what’s stopping you, Britni?

Three things:

• A final edit. Printing the words out on paper and reading them with a pen in hand seems to engage a different set of mental muscles than reading on a screen. As does listening to them spoken. I want to catch some of the small inconsistencies, awkward phrases, and so on before I share my finished work with the world.

• A cover image. I dummied one up using AI - see below - but for several reasons it’s not going to work. I’ll tell you why in a bit. I need something that won’t be embarrassing and won’t send the wrong signals.

• A blurb and some keywords and information that Amazon needs to show it to the best possible set of prospective readers.

And time …

Rather inconveniently, I’ve had a couple of trips on the calendar for months and they happen to fall just when I need some time to get these final tasks ticked off.

A family celebration one weekend. Two days of driving - not a huge distance, but there’s just me behind the wheel, so I take it easy - a day for the gathering, and a couple of nights of catching up with family and friends.

The next weekend, an international trip. I only had two days intervening and some obligations to fit into them. Maybe on the road I’ll have time for some tasks as above but I doubt it, going on past results when free time and internet evaporate.

However, I did get up at dawn on the Sunday, make myself a cup of coffee, pull out a slice of cold pizza, and settle down with my paper proof.

I went through a couple of pages, making some small changes here and there and then turned to Chapter 7.

Odd, I thought. This doesn’t sound right. My protagonist was supposed to be having an early-morning cup of coffee on her cabin balcony, enjoying the sunrise.

Instead I was reading about the other character in a scene some hours later. A crucial chapter, as it happened. A real turning point.

I thought that I might have somehow put the chapters in the wrong order when printing them out, punching them for binding in my Levenger disc system, and assembling them into a manuscript.

Nope. The page numbers were fine. The chapter title was the right one. I’d managed to copy the text from one writing app to another into the wrong place.

Lucky I caught the error, hey? That sort of thing tends to get the readers offside. Regardless of how prettily the book is formatted, if the contents are in the wrong order, or a chapter is missing or duplicated, it’s not going to be a great reading experience.

Only a matter of moments to find the correct text, replace it in the writing app, and when I got home, print out a fresh chapter to replace the old wrong’un.

Just part of the process

We authors are not stringing you along when we announce a book and then launch it two weeks later. Even though I can upload files to KDP and have it go live on Amazon a few hours later, I need to make sure my book is in good shape, and that takes some nitpicking, painstaking time. At the very least, I’ve got to read the whole book, word by word.

Luckily, reading with a pen in hand is something I can do in an airline lounge or up in the air, when I’d otherwise be limited in my abilities.

I’m moving as fast as I can; just bear with me, okay?

Britni