Today I spent most of the day doing interior revisions for The Subtlety of Light and Shadow, Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales Volume II and Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume III. Started doing The Archetypes-First Generation this evening, Kelly whipped through The Archetypes-Shockwaves for me after dinner tonight.
By interior revisions I mean I am cleaning up spacing issues, margin issues, justifying the text, removing excessive hyphenated words (the ones formerly at the end of sentences that popped up after justifying the text, removing hyperlinks, and finally making the chapter headers larger, making them bold, and lowering them a minimum of 1/3 down the page so chapters are easier to find. In the case of the books with collections of stories the individual stories are easier to find.
I am taking the advice of a Writer's Digest Self Published Book judge from last year, and a reader of Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume I on goodreads who won a free copy who mentioned the same thing about the stories being a little difficult to find, although she enjoyed them! (Yea!)
The Subtlety of Light and Shadow was just revised and had a face lift a few weeks ago, but I did not justify the text. Kelly taught me how to do that when she was preparing her two novels for self publication. So I pulled that and My Magical Life which also had had a recent revision of text and facelift. They now both have better covers. My Magical Life's second cover looked more like a self-help book than it did a fantasy novel. Now it's looking more like what it is! The Subtlety of Light and Shadow had gotten a bright pink background on the cover to match the paint being blended on the paintbrush on the palette on the cover. Today I changed the font color on the cover to yellow to match the blotch of paint in the lower left corner of the cover on the palette. It looks more like the romance novel that it is now.
Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume I will retain it's red background cover and black font colors. Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume II had the most boring cover of the three volumes. I notched it up by changing the pumpkin orange to fuchsia purple and the font color to orange, giving it a more Halloween-y appearance. The gate on the cover is not the fanciest or most eye catching but the new color makes the book stand out more. Then I tackled Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume III just before dinner. Got all the interior work done and then played with color combinations to rid it of it's too orange and black look, which really wasn't that exciting in the whole scheme of things. It now has a new midnight blue cover with orange text.
Quite a bit of work has been accomplished in the past week and a half with the interior changes to make the chapters stand out more and the new cover colors. Black King Takes White Queen is finished. Black Knight, White Rook will be approved tonight it all looks good. I went back to the Kelly green for Black Knight. White Rook, retaining the ivory font to distinguish it from Black King Takes White Queen which has a moss green cover and black font.
After the two Archetypes novels are done Kelly and I will work on the four Talon novels. I need to go back and justify the text in Life Skills which also had a recent interior revision and a change of font color on the cover. Might as well get them all polished up and as professional looking as I can possibly make them- they are a reflection of my work and who I am as an author, after all. I don't like sloppy!
Basically- I had no clue what I was doing when I first started self-publishing. I've learned a lot in less than 22 months. Time to put my best foot forward in the world of self publishing!
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