And it was a pain in the butt! Actually, now that I have the
hang of the different formatting, it won’t be as bad. And Flynn’s In, the sequel to AKA
Lexi Frost, may actually end up in print first or about the same time as I
bring it out as an eBook. I’m done with the formatting on it and
just have to do the whole proof thing.
Print formatting is different. For one, the Table of
Contents doesn’t just do itself. You have to put in page numbers. And (I
suspect) people expect them to be right. Margins matter and you can’t fiddle
with them.
Suddenly those ellipses that you had in an eBook that may
appear on one line or two depending on the font size the reader chose, need to be noticed. They have to be all on one
line.
And dashes matter (as a nod to Grammar Nazis). In print, you can
tell the difference. There’s a dash, an en-dash, and an em-dash. Who
cares? Some editors. Mine didn’t, but I do know the difference whether I choose
to observe it or not. I don’t like em-dashes, they’re big and unwieldy. I like
en-dashes, but there’s rarely a case where I’m allowed to use them. Regular
dashes are just “meh” and I’ll use them where they’re needed. If you don’t care
about these things, skip this whole paragraph.
I personally was very distracted by just a few words or one
line at the end of a scene being on a different page. For these issues, and the
ellipses issue, I had to find each instance, then do minor rewording to jigsaw
the words together better. So if you put the print version of one of my books
next to an eBook version, they will be slightly different. If I didn’t tell you, no one but me would
notice. Maybe my editor.
Oh, and the red stripe across the cover, that changed. It’s
still there, and still red, but it’s a different shade of red. Thought I would admit it before someone pointed it
out to me. As if that was going to happen.
So now my second book published (third written) is the first
in print. Yay!
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