Time to share some publishing experiences from this year. I’ve been lucky to be involved with three books. One reminded me of how lucky I have been with traditionally published books. The other two were interesting lessons learned.

In February, I was honored to be part of 50 Shades of Cabernet, a delightful collection of 18 stories by 19 writers, most of us Sisters-in-Crime members, although there are a couple of “bros” in the collection. We were invited to submit stories and worked independently. Our only direction was a maximum page length, the fact that each story had to include a mystery (didn’t have to be a murder mystery) and had to mention “Cabernet.”  This winey group of stories are, for the most part, light-hearted, with a few having darker overtones. My publisher, who does the Mad Max series, produced this collection. I had to write my story, polish it until I thought it shown, and then review the edits from the professional editor. We voted on the cover and waited until we could purchase copies to sell. Easy peasy.

I decided to self-publish another anthology, The Virginia Writers Club Centennial Anthology 1918-2018. I had a selection team help sort through the stacks of poems, short stories, and essays. A different team helped with the basic editing: commas in the right places, spelling, obvious typos. Easy peasy, huh! NOT! My inside designer had holy fits getting the various formats trued up to fit into a 6″ x 9″ book. Poetry was the easiest this time, with the essays causing him to say MANY bad words. Finally, we got to the place where CreateSpace accepted our words. The cover, which had been designed and approved earlier in the summer, didn’t meet CreateSpace’s standards. And didn’t meet them again and again. Finally, we took out a swirly design element and CreateSpace took pity on us and accepted the book. What should have taken one month once the editing was complete took nearly three months before the proof copies were ready.

During this time, I was simultaneously working with the publisher of the anthology and a different cover designer to finish Eyes Without A Face, my serial killer book about a feminist killer with her own moral compass. Or immoral compass, if you will. We gave ourselves two months. The actually formatting of the innards wasn’t that bad, since I was remarkably consistent with using Word styles. Alas, the formatting program didn’t always read the styles, so every page had to be reread and edited. Once again, the cover was the hardest. The designer game me a terrific cover, but CreateSpace was cranky about bleeds, of all things. We needed nearly three months…

The bottom line: if you think it will take you two months to get your book ready for publishing yourself, double that time. You’ll need it. And just maybe you’ll have a bit less stress than I did.