The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author - Chapter 14

The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author

Chapter 14

Now that we had selected our publisher, Authorhouse, and tested the market, it was time to pay the piper and get the book in print.
We paid our fee and soon began receiving e-mails.
The first was from the team assigned to transform our manuscript from a word document to a real book. The e-mail was quite lengthy and gave us detailed submission instructions including type size, indentions, spacing, page breaks, etc. PAGE BREAKS! WHAT’S THAT?
Back to the Internet. After reading everything we could find relating to their instructions, it was back to editing.
We had opted not to pay the HUGE fee for professional editing, so my poor wife and I had been over the manuscript a bazillion times. Each time we found corrections. It’s amazing how many times you can read something and whiz right by glaring errors.
So we read it again, and again, and again, until we were relatively comfortable that all the commas, quotes and page breaks were in the right place.
My poor sweetie read the whole thing at least eight times. She’s a trooper!
The next challenge was the full color cover. This was included in our package price. We had been working on ideas during the writing process and knew with a title like Lady Justice Takes a C.R.A.P., we needed a “wow” cover.
My wife and I have a combined 51 years in real estate sales and I am blessed to have a partner who has mastered Photoshop and Publisher and has created beautiful postcards and flyers.
Authorhouse gave us a website to look for images to use on our cover. We soon discovered that it would cost us $100 to purchase the rights to an image at that site. Wow!
Back to the Internet. We found www.Dreamstime.com and purchased the rights to the perfect image for our book for $5.00. It pays to shop.
Peg put together a beautiful cover.
We attached the manuscript and cover to an e-mail, and pressed “send” and our journey had begun.