Well, good morning to all of you!

I’d thought I’d take a minute and bring you up to speed on the book– mine, not Missy’s, though she tells me her new book is coming along nicely. Mr. Big Food and I were talking about her new work just yesterday. He was very interested. He especially liked that she’s doing more research on the First Circle– which isn’t such a bad place– as that’s where all of the poor genius souls who lived before Christ reside in Hell.

We also chatted about the fact that while Missy herself works very, very hard on her books– you wouldn’t believe the amount of research she does, her desk is piled high with books– I myself find them very easy to write. All I have to do is come up with an idea, and she takes it from there. Unlike writing and publishing a real book, there’s no writing or publishing involved in Missy’s books.

I am currently engaged in minutia. I am going to work with a profession design firm for both the interior, and cover designs. To do that I must gather a whole bunch of things like ISBNs, get a copyright certificate, register with the Library of Congress, and so on. Write the About about me.

That stuff is not too bad. The pain in the neck part is that I work in Pages. The entire book is in Pages. They work in Word. I know if doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but in Word for Mac formatting is not revealed like it is in PC Word. So for example, if I wanted to proof and go looking for random extra spaces between words, in both Pages and PC Word, I’d hit the “show invisibles” button and go looking for two blue in-line dots (which indicate two spaces). Also, sections breaks don’t show up as blue lines.

This is all a pain if you are something of a perfectionist. Plus, if the Word doc isn’t near perfect, the designer is going to have to spend more time formatting. Time is money. I’ve already been told, and I knew this, that because of the call-outs (the Missy-isms, “As someone once said” quotes, etc.) the quote I’ll get will be above the “beginning at” level of service for the premium package. So everything I can do on my end to get it near perfect should help.

Also in the back of my brain is marketing. Missy has yet to reveal to me what strategies she used for her first best-seller.

Finally, I decided that the book needs a simple index.

Just getting started. I remembered I took that indexing on-line class a few years ago, and have a book on indexing. So I got out me notes and the text for reference. Again, the book formatter will do the actual thing, but if I can have it in decent, simple shape, I think it will help.

Cost-sharing: Looking at my notes, I see the cost of the index (by a professional indexer) should be shared between the author and publisher. Heehee. I’ll check with myself and see how I want to do that.

Oh! This might be a good time to ask you to hit the Tip Jar! It would be much appreciated.