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Tag: Reedsy Book Editor

Eighty-Five Years Ago Today…

On July 22, 1934, the FBI Claimed that they finally “got their man” and gunned down Public Enemy Number One. They claim that s they shot John “Jackrabbit” Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Almost immediately, rumors started swirling that the corpse outside the Biograph didn’t belong to Dillinger, and that the Jackrabbit – just like Elvis, Jim Morrison and Bigfoot – was still alive somewhere.

Well, I had hoped to be able to have my new novel Jackrabbit ready for release today, but alas it was not to be. I underestimated the vagaries of the Amazon KDP process, as well as some glitches in the Reedsy Book Editor software.

The problem is that Reedsy doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the problem. I don’t care WHAT the Chicago Manual of Style says, “i” should not follow “iii” in any pagination scheme. Amazon certainly doesn’t think so, which is why they are refusing to print the book until the page numbers are corrected. I guess I’ll fool around with it some more, but I’ve got an ugly feeling that I’m going to have to drop my Acknowledgements section to get it to behave. Bleah!

So no book just yet, and the best I can do for an eBook is an Amazon pre-order page, since I clearly didn’t read the fine print, and checked a box that I couldn’t subsequently un-check. I’ll get this figured out soon, I hope.

Easy Reedsy

Throughout the process of preparing Jackrabbit to go to print, I have been availing myself of an online service called Reedsy. I initially used the service to find someone to edit the manuscript. I ended up engaging the services of an editor named Jennifer Huston of White Dog Editorial Services. She was great to work with, and incredibly thorough. She lives in the Chicago area, and was able to correct some of my geographical errors, as well as many others.

Of course, this kind of quality does cost some coin. Between the editing and the cost of the cover art, I had pretty much blown my production budget for this project. I was concerned about how I was going to typeset the book, as I knew I was going to have to do it myself. I had head any number of sources say that MS Word was a bad choice. Adobe InDesign seems to be an industry standard, but is fairly expensive. I did shell out twenty-five bucks for a discontinued publishing application called Serif Page Plus. It looks pretty good, but I didn’t really want to take the time to master a new software package.

Then I noticed than Reedsy offers a typesetting called Reedsy Book Editor. I was a bit skeptical at first, but what the heck – the price was right ($0). Besides, Reedsy had gotten their vig from my transaction with the editor, so I figured it was the least they could do.

Color me impressed, friends! After a few minor initial hiccups (i.e. user errors), I was able to upload my Word file and the Reedsy Book Editor cranked out a typeset version in about five minutes. Super-duper-cool! Now I have to read through the bastard one more time and make sure there are no proofreading errors. Fun ahoy!