Do My Trains Run On Time?
Have any of you been struck by the fact that trains in far-flung parts of the world run on much tighter, much more accurate, schedules than a particular train company beginning with an A, which monopolizes the tracks in the North American country also beginning with an A (or a U….. as in U.S.of A.) In India and all over Eastern Europe, I found the train system very efficient and on time. But, when I rode ours down the West Coast, we were running four to six hours late.
Now, what does this have to do with book production? Well, all the cars in my particular book production choo-choo train don’t quite match up yet, as far as when they will each be finished, so I can’t quite predict my arrival time into the hands of the printers.
The book cover design is 99% finished, except that they can’t convert my ISBN number into a bar code for that little white box on the back of the book. Plus, I don’t yet know the exact number of my pages and that is very crucial to getting the right spine width measurement. Nitty-gritty, but very necessary.
The interior manuscript is still on my computer getting last minute corrections before going back to my editor for a final check and preparation into finished manuscript form. Except that she doesn’t have the Adobe Acrobat software and can’t convert the manuscript from Word to a PDF file required by Lightning Source, my printer. I must farm out that operation and my Lightning representative, Natalie, has sent me some names to contact for that.
I guess I’m feeling nervous as a first-time small publisher and I’m wanting this little train of mine to roll smoothly into the station…on time… (though, truly, I don’t have a deadline to meet, just an event to coordinate)…and not yet knowing how long all these independent operations are going to take. Being a first timer, tiptoeing into the big time, I guess it’s just symptoms of stage fright at this point. Pretty soon, all of this preparation will lead to something. That’s where the rubber finally meets the road and I get a look at this object called a book that I have been slaving over for quite awhile now.
You deal with each part separately for so long:
The writing – story, grammar, punctuation, layout, meaning…in one department;
The exterior – cover design and those necessary few words…in another department;
The official numbers and categories that must be applied for from a number of departments,
as well as new things that keep revealing themselves.
Those are the carriages that will make up my particular train. The station is Lightning Source, my printer. The cars must be completed and hitched together professionally before they can truly be called a train, qualified to roll into the station. Here’s where I come into my own as a Publishing Company, Hey Boomers Media.
I want my train to run on time. The next few weeks will tell the story.
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