I finished the proofread of the book. I am so, so glad that I ordered a physical proof copy this year. There were a number of typos, and I’m not 100% sure that I would have found all of them reviewing a pdf. Ambrose did his read through before I did. He missed a couple of errors so egregious that I had to point them out to tease him, but he caught a lot too.
Next step is getting the updates into the document. Then I’ve got some picture captions to update (some for clarity, some for typos). Once those are ready, I’ll update the pictures in the document, and then I’ll have to adjust the text. You see, I’ve got some updates that add or cut significant chunks, and that will disturb the precise placement required of each photo plate. I will need to drag them around within the text to make sure I don’t have any extra white space in the final product.
Once that process is complete, I’ll get to find out if I also need to edit the cover. The cover has precise measurement requirements based on the number of pages, so if my page count changes significantly, I would have to edit the cover to accommodate the new dimensions. It’s a bit of a pain.
I hope to have this book published by the end of the month, at least in the large print. In the past, I’ve rushed things and created the large print, standard print, and kindle editions in parallel. This year, I decided to work only on the large print until all the editing was complete,. I’ve always thought of that after being committed to managing the three copies individually, and I’m glad I remembered to try it this year. The process should be fairly quick to generate the standard print and kindle editions from the Word documents, and not too painful to generate the covers for those. But it might take me a little longer nonetheless.
And I know the Smashwords edition will take a bit longer than that, because I always need to remind myself of exactly what the process is that I need to use for these books. Smashwords has an excellent automatic conversion system, but it doesn’t work on source documents over a certain size, and my Hike with Me books, with their large quantity of pictures, are generally well over the size limit. I have to upload my own conversion for these. It works well enough for Barnes and Noble’s website.
And once this book is complete, I’m going to work on some updates to my trail guides. I’ve got a few to make, and I might have more next year. I need to set up a routine for myself to make those updates on a yearly basis – at least, on years when I visit those trails.