So, this morning I finished my first round of proofreading and minor edits on Princesses In SPACE!!! Stardancer (wow, it feels weird typing that after so many years of the working title), and it came time to upload the files. I’m using CreateSpace to create the book, and the process is pretty simple: when you’re done typing and formatting and whatnot, you export the innards of your book as a single PDF, which you then upload to CreateSpace for their “Review Process”. This process involves the CreateSpace folks looking over your file to make sure it meets their standards for printing. This is all about typographical and design stuff: do you have illustrations or text too far outside or inside their margins, will your fonts work on the page, et cetera. This process takes twenty-four hours or so, after which time they notify you that you’re either good to go or you need to do some tweaking.
After that point, you can do one of two things: Order another proof copy, in which case they send you a copy of the book to go over again, or approve the proof for publication. If you do more proofing and you find things to change, you have to then make a new PDF and re-upload it so they can do the Review Process again.
So, this morning I reached the point where I was ready to re-upload the new PDF of the book’s guts. However…I screwed this up, and actually initiated the Review Process without uploading anything new. So they’re reviewing the files they’ve already reviewed once before, and I have to wait twenty-four hours for this because there’s no mechanism for canceling this process. It would be nice if they gave you a ten-minute window, say, in which to cancel the review if you uploaded the wrong thing; or, maybe, have warning pop up along the lines of, “You have no uploaded any new interior files since the last review process. Do you wish to continue with the Review on the already-existing and uploaded files?”
As the title of the post says: Argleblargle!
Look, this isn’t a huge deal, really. It isn’t. But I’m at the point in this project where days matter. I’m releasing five weeks from tomorrow, and it takes about a week to get the review copy. So losing a day of production work actually hurts at this point…I want to be able to finalize the book by the 24th of this month, so I can upload the final revised contents (if I have to make any more corrections) and then be able to get things rolling so I can have my beta-reader and family-and-friend copies in hand before I officially release on the 12th of next month. This is the point where losing a day is not a good thing. Not fatal, either, but still: Argleblargle!
(Oh, and don’t forget to visit ForgottenStars.net tomorrow for the Big! Cover Art! Reveal!. But you won’t forget, because you’re awesome, and I’ll remind you tomorrow anyway.)
Is createspace just for self publishers or is used by those who are shopping the book for publication as well?
Did you use it when you were shopping your book for publication?
Congratulations on the new step, but urg on the arglebargle indeed.