I started editing the book last night. Yesterday I worked on cover stuff and I’m certain now that I’m going to take a week this year and spend it learning as much as I can about image editing and design. I use GIMP, which I’m quite happy with, to be honest, but design isn’t something I’m that comfortable with. I can repair old photos, which is the first thing I learned to do on Photoshop over 15 years ago, but that certainly doesn’t help me create a vision for a book cover and then translate that into an actual cover.
I’m excited that I got that stuff out of the way though, including the cover copy for the book, listing out my keywords, etc, so publishing will go smoothly.
Then I started the edits. Since this book is going to require an unusual number of edits from me, I made a copy of the draft specifically for the purpose of comparing it at the end of my work using Word’s compare feature.
I want to see what I’ve changed, but mostly I just want to feel comfortable making all the changes. Since I work in one doc, I don’t want to have to rely on going back to one of my many (many, many) copies if something goes wrong, but I also know better than to use the track changes in a doc I plan to turn into an ebook.
Track changes will kill your formatting and create a mess to be cleaned up. My suggestion is to never use it if you can help it. If you send a doc to an editor or readers for comments, just read off it and manually make your edits in your original draft.
I’ll just do a legal blackline compare at the end and make sure everything looks good.
Now, it’s time to finish those edits. I have a lot to do, and very little time to do it in! :D