E-Publishing Penguins!
Yes, Penguins Have Square Eyes is up and running as an e-book. Getting it done was easier and faster than I ever imagined. It’s got a new and much better cover than the original hardcover published in 1962. It’s been re-formatted by the amazingly creative Jaye Manus who made it look 1,000% better than the original publishers did.
As Constant Reader probably gathered from my last post – Go South, Young Man! – and its comments, the hardest part of this e-publishing project was dealing with the author (myself 50 years ago) and his editor-publisher (myself today.)
My first impulse, on re-reading Penguins, was to rewrite the whole damn thing or, at least, some of it. But my wise writer friends convinced me that the book’s value was not what I wish it could have been, but what it was originally. By and large, I followed their advice, although I did delete one gratuitously sexist remark and replaced some euphemisms with the actual cuss words – but not all. After some internal wrestling with myself, I did go back to the young writer’s first draft and added a couple of revealing scenes that he was too modest to have published at the time. (There was more to this flippant fellow than he realized.)
Having spent (or wasted) enough time indulging in perfectionism (or procrastination), I pulled the trigger and fired off my request for help to Jaye. I emailed her at 11:56 am, April 11.
Jaye replied at 1:07 pm. She had checked my text files and images. “I can have my cover guru, Jayne, resize your cover (it’s too small) and make the typography stand out more,” she wrote. Jaye quoted her fee and closed with: “If this is good, say Go and I’ll get started on it today.”
On April 12, I received two versions of my new cover – both great. I finally picked the one I liked best. Two days later, April 14, Jaye sent me a MOBI file to view on my Kindle and proofread plus a coded text file and clear instructions on how to use the proofreading system she had invented. Once I got the hang of it, it worked like a charm. It took me a few meticulous days to check all 67,881 words but I was able to send the final proof back to Jaye on April 19. Then I settled back to wait.
I sure didn’t have to wait long. The formatted, ready-to-be-uploaded-to-Kindle file arrived just before noon the very next day, April 20. Then, at 2:39 pm, the Nook version showed up followed by the Smashwords version at 6:27 pm.
It took me a while to upload Penguins because I’d forgotten most of what I learned to do while publishing Bitter Medicine last year, the book about medical malpractice I co-authored with Dr. Richard Kessler. Even so, I cut the time from final draft to the publication of the original hard cover book by at least six months – or maybe even a year.
The moral of the story? If you want to publish your own book, check out the Jaye Manusblog posts and jump in. So, Woof! If this old dog can learn new tricks, so can you.
Originally published on May 8, 2013