The zoom parties just don’t end. Instead of being up all night finalizing a manuscript, I screen shared with my two new authors to do several rounds of tweaking to remove any errors in the preview launcher. Those who publish online with Amazon know what I’m talking about. Those yellow triangles that tell you when your formatting is outside the safe zone can really test your patience when you’re so close to the end of publishing your book.
Our time together wasn’t short. We started at 5:30 pm and to our surprise all the editing rounds and special formatting that I did through the finalization of our book didn’t pass the previewed. It was a few more rounds of quick fixes because the cover didn’t spill over the edge far enough of their recommendations. Then, it was about 5-6 rounds of going through editing to understand why the settings that they recommended for a 6×9 book flagged warnings on the inside and outside margins.
All I have to say after closing our zoom session around 10:00 pm, is that you need to be patient as a author when it comes to all the behind the scenes work that it takes to publish a novel. The readers don’t see all the formatting steps, or the sizing of pages that occurs with designers. I felt like I was spinning plates as I switched between my devices to make changes to the cover design and reformat the book.
Here was what we found for Micro Soft Word documents for 6×9 books:
- The inside margin recommends .5 for the gutter but we had to add .13” to the inside or it was cut off.
- The outside margin was set for .25 but I bumped it up to .3
- The top and bottom recommendation was .75
- Our page number had to be fixed because it linked to the title and copyright pages. Trying to add page breaks and unlink headers wasn’t very fun.
- When you’re setting your margins, check the the drop down that you are changing the “whole document” because it defaults to only changing “this section” or paragraph you are on.
- If you convert to a .pdf, then you need to embed the fonts because they may not have the font you chose for the cover or in other places.
- When you’re lost and keep getting errors, then you need to google and watch YouTubes from other writers who received the same warnings.
At the end, I wanted to reach through the screen and take one of their beers. We cheered each other once we finally passed the preview launched and approved our book. I took a screen shot before the “publish my book” button was hit.
After all was said and done, we decided we needed a few days off before we worked on uploading the ebook version of their book. I’m also in the process of waiting for my own book to go “live”. What a way to head into Valentine’s weekend!
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