Road to Publication #19: Completing the ARCs

Whew!  Anyone want to take a breath with me?  Breathe in, Breathe out.  Breathe in, Breathe out.  Ahhhh feels good, doesn’t it?

So, yes, the arcs are done.  What did I find?

There were a few odd editing errors.  I mean… really odd editing errors.  For instance, a sentence ended a paragraph in the original version.  All of the rest of that paragraph was deleted, but that particular sentence remained, but was added to a different paragraph where it made no sense.  Yeah, weird… I know.

What I also came across were places where a string of speech was removed for one reason or another, leaving what was left behind “hollow”…  meaning someone answered a question that was never asked, or things like that.  Yes, weird again.

I also found a sentence where a word was missing, but it was in the original text.  Isn’t that odd?  I guess I took for granted that the file would be cut and pasted.  Apparently not.

What I marked mostly was something that I DON’T think they will fix, even though I asked for it.  The reason is that I just saw the same thing in a published novel from this publisher.

It’s silly, and very anal I will admit… but on my Kindle, if a sentence falls off with a “…” at the end… if placed correctly, the “…” will be treated as its own word and end up all by itself on a line.  I asked that ending “…” ellipses be attached to the final word in each case where they appear.

Like I said… I can ask, right?  I hope they do it, because I think it will look better.

The hard part of this whole project was transferring all my notes from my Kindle onto an Excel spreadsheet so they could review it in the format that they requested.  I suppose it would have been easier if I edited on my computer in PDF format, then I could have just created the spreadsheet at the same time.

Yes, in retrospect it would have been easier, but if I come across this again, I will probably do it the same way.  The reason is that I enjoyed the experience of reading it on the Kindle, as my readers will see it.  It just looked “different.”

(And it’s cool having the cover with my name on it appearing in my Kindle Carousel 🙂 )

Ah… vanity… definitely my favorite sin.

Oh!  Impromptu movie game!  Anyone know who said that line, and what movie it came from?

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15 responses to “Road to Publication #19: Completing the ARCs

  1. Vanity … definitely my favourite sin … I’m going to say Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I will say it with a completely straight face, too.

  2. I’d strongly agree with you about the ellipses. They need to be attached to the last word. (I thought they should be anyway?)
    As for the other weird changes, do they provide rationale? That’s what I’d ask for… unless it really annoyed them! 😉

  3. You worry too much, but at the same time, I understand you’re wanting it to be just perfect. And the movie quote is Devil’s Advocate, as Tristan already guessed. 🙂

  4. Those kind of details, I think, make all the difference. It’s good to be picky.

  5. I’ve seen a similar thing with em dashes on the Kindle. In fact, they’ll spill onto the next page if they fall at the “end” of one. It is distracting. But I’m afraid it’s not something that will get addressed in the next generation of e-readers. Given the decline of punctuation in the digital age, I don’t think it’s going to get much consideration in electronic formats. 😦

  6. It’s amazing how a little formatting can change so much in a book. Hope everything goes smoothly.

  7. Very strange indeed! Hopefully it will work out in the end.

  8. Please don’t hate me for what I’m going to tell you. If your book is to be sold on Barnes & Noble’s site, the version for Nook will also be formatted differently. I had no idea about that until after notified by readers of weird formatting issues that aren’t present in the .prc or Kindle version.

  9. “Is this a test?” … “Isn’t everything?”

  10. By the way, I read books on a Kobo and while I haven’t seen Kobo treat isolated ellipses that way, I would definitely want to avoid that. It would totally pull me out of the read if I came across something unexpected like that. I hope you’re successful in getting hem formatted correctly. It IS important,

  11. If I had to guess, I would guess “Devil’s Advocate”.