I’m working on the final files for three new titles today and it has me thinking about what it feels like when you’re about to hit publish on a new title. By my count these will be my 136th, 137th, and 138th titles I’ve published.
Now, before you get all impressed with that number a lot of those early titles were short stories and I’ve published collections of other works as well as spun off portions of books into their own series, so on one level that number is not as impressive as it sounds.
But regardless of how long the title is or how much new material it includes the publication stage is always the same for me. There’s a lot of second-guessing. Did I spellcheck? Did I scan through for formatting issues? Am I presenting the information in a way that readers expect and that will work well for them for that format?
And that is, of course, on top of the thoughts about “is this something of value” to my readers? Are they going to get valid information and enough of it out of this non-fiction title? Are they going to enjoy this story or novel? Is what I’m putting out there worth someone paying money for it?
It can be easy to get stuck at this point. Because you don’t want to mess it up. You want to put out a good product that people will like. But I can tell you, no matter how careful you are, no matter how many people look at it, no matter how many times you look at it, things will slip through here or there. Hopefully not big things, but years later you’ll find a paragraph that should be indented here or a missing comma there. It happens.
It annoys me no end every time I later see one of those, but I figure you can’t let pursuit of perfect get in the way of completing a project. In my opinion, perfect isn’t actually possible, so I aim for pretty damned good. (My A- Student Philosophy of Life.)
It works for me. But I’m still going to do one last scan of all these files. Just in case…
M.L. Humphrey 