Writers have it tough these days. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that. If you are reading this blog you are probably a writer yourself. And, for a writer these days, there's no moment quite like the one when your physical book comes rolling off the line for the first time, and you get to lay your eyes on the corporeal embodiment of the project you have slaved over, usually for years, obsessing over each phrase and comma. This moment has been likened to childbirth, but frankly I found childbirth to be a snap by comparison.
Oh, the stories I have heard from my fellow writers. Typefaces that change halfway down the page, or sometimes several times throughout the book. Formatting that appears almost random. (Who knew there were so many places that a section heading might appear on a given page?) And, my own recent nightmare: The pretty red cover I ordered for my book Teaching the Dog to Think that came back a dark and hideous purple-brown.
Sigh. Sob.
So much for your dreams and fantasies of what your book was going to look like, right? Welcome back to the real world, foolish writer.
And the real world it is, for now you have a rotten decision to make for which there are no easy answers. How close is this book to the one you wanted? Are the problems repairable? If so, are they worth the additional money (sometimes considerable) and weeks (often many) that will be required to fix the mistakes and errors that have crept in?
What is one to do? (I mean, what is one to do AFTER the strong drink. After the long hot bath and the valium. After the rants over the phone to your editor, your friend, your spouse.)
Well, the first guidance I have, and the easiest, is to make absolutely every textual edit you can before the book ever goes to the printer. Hire freelance editors, copy editors, fact checkers. Hire everyone you need to get it right, and enlist friends to be your second pair of eyes. Once the book is sent off to the printer, everything gets much more expensive to fix, so do all of your editing and fixing ahead if you possibly can.
Also, edit every proof as if it were the only one. Why? Because problems can creep in later in the process, particularly coding problems, where someone just happens to hit the wrong key by mistake. It feels personal, but it isn't. Every page needs to be checked each time you get back a proof.
But of course, as with my book, there are things you don't actually see until you are holding the physical object in your hand. Like the actual cover color. Like where those titles, headings and quotations really sit on the page. So then what? What do you do when the titles and section headings you've slaved over are riding a bit too low. Is it worth fixing? How low are they, really? How low is low? How high is high?
And what about the way you feel? Your dreams have been dashed after all, so you aren't going to be particularly happy at this moment, especially when you have already planned the book launch party and are postponing it for the third time. Or when you've told friends and family that your book would be coming out "any moment now"--and that was three months ago. Oh, the personal and professional embarrassment. Oh, the grinding and gnashing of the teeth. Is it worth fixing the problems? Or better just to push the flawed object out the door, and hope that you are the only one who notices. Because, in truth, you are the only one who cares THIS MUCH about your own book.
And that's really the problem, isn't it? Until we writers have control of every aspect of the publishing process, we are never going to be truly happy. Because we are fixers, obsessors, tweakers. It's a congenital problem among writers. We became writers in the first place because we liked to move commas and chicken scratchings around the page. There will always be things to tweak and change. At some point, you have to cut it off.
And so we must decide, as we gaze at our "proof" books, which will never quite match up to the ideal inside our word-obsessed heads, if it's close enough. Or is the trouble inside of us? Is it something we actually need to fix? Or, like the ding in the paint job you obsessed too much over in the living room, is it something that only you will ever really notice.
Okay, I had to find out. So I showed the ugly brown cover to my husband. I didn't tell him anything ahead of time, just held it out in front of his nose, and said, "What do you think?" His face wrinkled up, as if he'd just smelled something bad. "Ewww," he said, and looked at me.
"It was supposed to be red," I explained.
"You'll need to get that fixed," he said.
I felt a great sense of relief when he said that. It wasn't just me. The cover really was extremely dark and hideous. It really was worth fixing, even if it meant putting off the book launch party yet again, in this case until after Christmas.
It was nice that someone else, someone I trusted, could confirm this for me. As another friend put it, "It's been a long marathon, writing this book. Don't quit on heartbreak hill." I knew what she meant. She had watched this book go through numerous drafts, two agents, various editors. Nearly a year of production. I hadn't come all this way to settle for something unsatisfactory.
In the end, this experience was, for me, about persistence. About not quitting until I got it right. We went back to our creative team, who found just the right persimmon red that you see above, and made it a reality. While it's not the red cover I originally imagined, I think it's a good one. It's a nice color for an early spring book launch. It sets off the black and white cover photo well. And, most importantly, in this newly digital age, it shows up well online.
I think, now, that my book is right. Everything. The cover, the section headings, the formatting, everything. And if it isn't, and you happen to find a typo on page 56, or on the back cover, then don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I'll just want to fix it.
Kim's new memoir, Teaching the Dog to Think, about her touching and hilarious encounter with dog agility training, is now out and available for purchase HERE. The Kindle Edition will launch in the spring of 2012.
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