Making the formatting process easier for yourself

I’m working on my first attempt to self-publish a non-fiction book right now. It’s a spiritual-devotional work about how the strategies in the Book of Mormon can help us recognized how Satan is attacking us and help us find strategies to resist.  But I’m not going to rhapsodize over that.

This is actually my second attempt to get it ready for publication. My first attempt was stymied more than 6 months ago by an attack of anxiety and severe “what-if” –it is that sapped my motivation to deal with the issues that kept cropping up.  I suffered a further setback when my USB drive holding my edited files and my cover files crashed and lost all its data.  I had an old back-up, but I lost a lot of things.   So I was faced with the task of re-doing everything I previously did before to prepare my manuscript. 

This was very demoralizing.

But I realized a number of things. I gained some good lessons from it.

Lesson #1: Back-up your data. I think this is one that every writer has to learn, either from losing valuable files themselves, or from knowing someone else who lost valuable files.

Lesson #2: Make it easy for yourself to retrace your steps.  It takes a lot of effort to prepare a Word document so it looks pretty as a book for upload. Lots of formatting involved [insert grimace here]. At each stage I had to learn how to do something new. I realized that if I’m going to publish more books—and I’m pretty sure I will—I’ll be retracing my steps through the formatting and publishing process.  I won’t do it often enough to remember exactly how to do it, so I’ll essentially have to retrain myself each time. But if I document where to go and how to do things, I can make that retraining process a lot faster. 

Lesson #3: Publishing can go faster if you spend time while writing your book putting together all the supporting and marketing content, like blurbs and a marketing plan, and a synopsis, and a query letter, gathering category and keyword ideas, and so on. Sure, some of that might change by the end, but it’s easier to revise what’s already there than it is to come up with something fast.

Lesson #4 Make a publishing checklist and make it as granular as you can.  For a long time when I faced the task of reformatting my manuscript, I had this idea that it should be easy, but then I would try to work on it, and I’d get stuck because I’d run into something else that had to be done first, something that required more time or energy than I was prepared to give at the moment. So I’d pull back, feeling the task was really complex. Then after a few days I’d forget what stopped me before and try to jump into it again, only to get stuck again.

I finally decided to make a task list of everything I had to do. I wanted to make it is granular as possible, including in it all the things I had to research, all the bits of info I needed to retrieve from somewhere in my files, all the questions I had to answer, and so on.  I needed to break the tasks up into such small pieces that it would no longer intimidate me.  My task list turned into a 68-item monster, but at least I felt I had more of a handle on what I needed to get done.  I’m actually still refining this task list and it is up to 95 tasks, but each thing I add breaks it down further so I am less likely to get stuck.

If you’re an author, what do you do to make the publishing process easier and faster for yourself?