Self-Publishing Update— round two of proof copies

Monday night I sat in my study in Cincinnati with my marked-up proof copy of Dancing in Heaven talking to Anna, over the phone, who sat in her apartment in Columbus, Ohio in front of her computer. We incorporated the corrections and changes into the InDesign document of Dancing in Heaven. I had 24 pages marked with corrections and this was after extensive reading, re-reading, and revising.

“On the back cover, in the summary paragraph, get rid of the extra space between the words ‘back’ and ‘for,'” I said.

“Yeh.” Anna said. “You had a lot of those in the book. I did a search and replace and got rid of them.”

“Why didn’t I notice that?” I ask. “Thanks. On page 22, fifth paragraph, change ‘My dad was back home with the rest of us’ to ‘My dad was back home with Carol and me,'” I said. I must have missed that change I needed to make when I had to rewrite to remove my two siblings from the memoir.

“On page 38, change ‘Day 5’ to ‘Day 6.'” We already had one Day 5; I didn’t think we needed two. Probably would be better to add the ‘Day 8’ which was missing. How did that happen?

“On page 65 the paragraph has a blank line in the middle,” I said.

“Oh,” Anna replied. “I missed that one.”

“Page 80. Get rid of the orphan quotation mark.”

“Page 118. Put ‘the’ in front of ‘cabinet.'”

So many mistakes, still. With self-publishing no one has my back.

Anna made all the changes I requested. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll upload the revised copy to Createspace.”

“Good.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “On the back cover, do you see an apostrophe between ‘Annie’ and the ‘s’?”

“No.”

“Probably should be one there.”

“Yep.”

We both laughed. It’s never going to end.