I have submitted my most recently completed manuscript—Kick Assitude—to my publisher.
My publisher only deals in e-books. This means I have to either find a publisher who is willing to publish only in print format—yeah right—or publish them in print form myself.
So, my next task is to format my upcoming novel, Way Out of Line for CreateSpace
I do not have a clean copy devoid of all the edits. The only almost clean copy I have is the Author’s Review Copy (ARC), which is in pdf.
This means I first have to and remove all the formatting. To do this you save it as a plain text file — .txt. You then save it again as an old word file —doc.
All the changes and edits I discovered when I went through my ARC have to be made in the Word copy.
After that, I have to read through it and put in the italics where necessary, and make sure everything is correctly formatted. Last time I found a lot of broken sentences, and several extra spaces between line which had to be removed.
Once I am sure everything is 100% correct, I’ll copy and paste it onto the downloaded CreateSpace template for the size I have chosen, which is 5″x 8″. This is the most common size for mass market paperbacks. If you choose an odd size, some book sellers won’t take your book.
When the manuscript is ready, I’ll upload it to CreateSpace and wait for their comments. From past experiences, I imagine they will find something that needs to be changed, like the print being too high at the top of too low at the bottom.
Time will tell. I don’t want to release the print book before the e-book, so I am not in a great hurry.
Trish Jackson, Author 