#AmWriting – It’s Hard

The debate rages on. What’s the hardest part of being a writer? Some will tell you it’s the act of creation itself. Creating characters, settings, entire worlds, struggling with dialogue, building tension, making sure all the plot points are present, and polished. Others maintain that it’s the editing that is the true struggle. Reading and re-reading the work. Questioning every word choice, sentence structure, punctuation, endless spelling gaffes. While still others will say that all that pales to the marketing. Exercising parts of our personalities that are often not the most robust. Details, repetition, fine-tuning, and more.

I will beg to differ with all that.

The hardest part is formatting.

This is a challenge to those of us who self publish. If you have a traditional publisher, it spares you some of the arguments above, but formatting your book is something you will only have to approve, rather than struggle with yourself. For the self-published, it is a high hurdle in the middle of the challenge course.

At least it is for me.

I have two books out in the world right now. I will avoid the urge to do some marketing here (the experts will be appalled) and just direct you to the link at the bottom. You can check them out there. The first, a book of short stories, was my experiment volume. I wanted to see if I could come up with enough stories to make a slim volume. Stories that I wasn’t embarrassed to share. It was a chance to check out the entire process of self-publishing. It was challenging and interesting and educational. Once the book was out, I wasn’t overly worried about it. It was what it was.

Then last year, I dropped book number two. A collection of stories from my time as a rideshare driver. This book was a more serious attempt at being a published author. I labored over the details of writing and editing. But it was formatting the book that drove me crazy.

I wanted to have a more polished appearance this time. That meant upping my formatting game. Easy, right?

If only.

That book has been through three formatting phases, so far. I had set a publication date, even doing pre-sale, so I had to complete the book by a specific date. And there were formatting issues I could not fix by that date. So the book went up for sale with some issues. For example, Chapter titles were being separated from the body of the chapters. But only in a couple chapters. My software insisted on making the Introduction Chapter One. That last one was because I hadn’t learned the ins and outs of my software well enough.  I fixed click one box and that one. Why the former issue? Still not 100% sure, but I found a workaround. Then other issues cropped up when I went to review. More tedious tweaking, more mining down deep into my software, and the publishing platform setups to make sure that every single box was checked or unchecked correctly.

When I finally got the book close to what I wanted, I realized that the first book was much, much worse. And while that didn’t bother me before, it does now. And, with new learning to help, I dug into making that one better too.

But I would so much rather be writing!

Peace

Jay