Right now, it is Sunday morning. I’m sitting in my normal coffee shop with a cup of coffee and a box of homemade cinnamon sugar donut holes. It’s lightly raining outside. The paperback copies of Champion Bold are sitting on my dining room table; the hardcovers are on order. The supplement proofs (round 2) are on their way. I have nothing I have to do this Sunday morning. So, I’m going to reflect.

Champion Bold will be my first book in six years. I’m hoping my next book, either The Colonel Lieutenant (Sasha book 3) or Champion Impact (the sequel to Champion Bold), or perhaps some other project, will be published next year. Maybe, more than one. But if I’m going to do that, I need to be faster and more efficient at my writing and my editing.

So, in this post, I’m going to write down some lessons I’ve learned from this process. Some of this may be obvious, and some of this may be things I’ve touched on in past blog posts. But I mean to assemble all these little bits in one post that I can reference as I’m working on future projects. This is particularly true with the graphic intensive supplement books, which were quite a new experience for me to deal with.

And now, the lessons. In no particular order:

Do the world building first

I’m already doing a whole blog series on why this is important and the PBRG process I’ve developed for projects. But working on the supplement books for Champion Bold, there were several instances where I added stuff that could have been great in the book, if I had built it before hand. But it would have been too much to shoehorn it in afterwards. Build first, write second.

Check and proof constantly

Scrivener doesn’t have a great spell and edit checking program, not like Word or other dedicated text programs. And a lot of time at the end of Champion Bold was spent spell checking and edit proofing. Processing chapters earlier through Word would have saved time at the end.

Add words to the dictionary

You can reset the dictionary of a Word editor pretty easily. This is helpful when your science fiction story includes alien names that count as over two thousand spelling errors. It’s a lot easier to catch that you mixed up reasonably and responsibility when you’re not wading through 500+ uses of the word Bendradi.

Use page breaks to control the flow

Converting a document from word to PDF really messes with the layout. Particularly in the supplement books. What looked nice in word, with two pages per section, was suddenly all over the place. Using page breaks to control the flow of the document is necessary.

Put images in front of text

I found this out almost by accident. Unless the image is surrounded by text, put it ‘in front of text’, which gives you a lot more flexibility in controlling where it goes. This is particularly helpful with full-page images; I could have the heading information in the back and covered with the image. Worked out really well.

Print color pages before proofs

The biggest surprise with the first supplement proofs was how much darker everything was on page. Wasn’t noticeable with my first printed books because the the images weren’t too important (the Renaissance Calling backer book) or were in black and white (Templar Scholar). But when you’re printing pictures of spaceships against starfields, it matters. Print in color to see how different a printed picture is against what shows up on a bright monitor.

More time for proofing PDFs

One thing I did well this round that I learned from earlier books was to spend time proofing the printed proofs. But I could definitely improve on spending time proofing the PDF proof that KDP offers. It might save time, or at least a round of physical printing.

Highlight the word ‘said’

I did this late in the project and it was good, but a mind-numbing process. I did a search for the word ‘said’, then clicked next. Wherever I found sequences of the word appearing many times in a short amount of time, I fixed it. I chose different words, or removed or changed dialogue so it didn’t need a word. It felt better afterwards. I only wish I had done it sooner, and by chapter, instead of with the entire document at once.

Put the publishing date a long ways out

When you’re setting up the publishing date in KPD or Ingram Spark, put it a long ways out, months away. Unless you have a deadline coming up (and if you do, by all means pay attention to it), there’s no reason to give yourself an artificial one.

Work on all editions of the book simultaneously

Don’t do the hardcover, then the paperback, then the eBook. If there’s one minor change between one edition an another, that can be really frustrating to let through, or to fix. Do all editions at the same time, and fix them all at the same time.

And so on…

With Champion Bold finished and the supplement either done or one short revamp away from completion, I’m ready to move onto the next project (or projects, given how my mind works). This weekend was a nice, relaxing reset from the harsh editing of the last month, and it’ll be good to get back into writing and creating. And I believe the next project will go smoother, both in the writing and the publishing, thanks to lessons learned, written down, and not forgotten.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

Michael