I have officially left the limbo stage of waiting while  Disappearing in Plain Sight was with the layout team and have entered into my first round of formal revisions.

When the email arrived from Friesen Press two days ago, I could barely catch my breath. There was a link to a four page document of detailed instructions on how to manage revisions within an e-proof – a process that is somewhat picky to say the least. Following instructions, I waded through all of this before actually opening the three attached files – e-proofs for the hardcover book jacket, the soft cover, and the text of the actual book.

My first look at how the cover had turned out was a thrill. We printed it up in black and white, on plain paper. We fooled around with a couple of copies to get the size right and sort of tacked them together with scotch tape. We then wrapped this makeshift book jacket over a hard cover book of the right size. I think it was at that moment, looking at how neat even that crude effort seemed, that the whole thing hit me – Disappearing in Plain Sight is going to be a real book. Amazing!

Naturally, there are a few things I’ll want changed – that is what revision rounds are for. But all in all, the sight of that book cover sure made my day.

Working with revisions for the text portion of the book is a challenge. It has to be revised within the e-proof itself using the tools provided by Adobe. A bit of a learning curve for sure. Formatting changes are handled by a function called sticky notes. First click the sticky note icon, place cursor where the note is to be located, click again and a text box will appear. Write instructions for the layout team in this text box.  Being clear about what I want is harder than I imagined. It would be so much easier to sit across the table with a real person and explain how I want things to look. But this is the process and I am making the best of it!

So – I’m coming up on a busy weekend. We’ll be stowing away all the Christmas stuff. We always try to wait for the twelve days of Christmas to go by before we take down the tree. I’ll be working on end of the year stuff for the business books and plunging into a slow and careful look through the e-proof for the dreaded typos, repeated words, extra words or missing words. Those little nagging errors that dog the self-published author who has to do this tedious work his or herself. Wish me luck!