I finished what I call a ‘third draft’ of Star Kings, and I’ve been getting it ready for publication.This has taken much longer than I had hoped. I read through it one more time for obvious typos, errors, and weaknesses. I then read it aloud for text, flow, and readability, and fixed more typos, doubled or missing words, wrong choice of words, bad phrasing, sentences or paragraphs which were out of place, and other things. I used a text-to-speech reader which revealed a few more problems, which I had not seen in all the drafts and edits until then. It took that much polish to meet the standards which I have set for myself. 

Formatting did not take as long as I had feared. Most of the things I fixed were widows and orphans, that is, when only the first line of a paragraph is at the bottom of a page, or the last line is at the top. I also fixed paragraphs when the last line was only one word that was fewer than five letters, or was the last part of a hyphenated word. I wasn’t so minutely picky this time about line spacing and kerning, but it still took a couple days. I may do a post on formatting later. 

I created the front-matter, which includes title pages, also-by’s, copyright notices, and so on. I added three appendices; for Characters (to remind readers who they were without me having to repeat it), for Other Peoples (those non-humans on other worlds, so I didn’t have to describe them every time), and a Brief Glossary, for terms which I had made up, and for words which had a special meaning in the story. That didn’t take very long either.

I began the process of submitting the book to the company which is my printer/binder. The first thing they want is the title, which can’t be changed later. That’s when I discovered that Star Kings was the title of a book published by Edmond Hamilton in 1947, so I couldn’t use it, and had to come up with something different. It feels strange to say it, but it took me three days, and dozens of bad ideas, before I finally settled on Turning Point. It’s appropriate, because the story is full of turning points, which are events or decisions or discoveries which change the way the story will go and what will follow.

Then I needed a blurb, which is the text that is on the back cover of the book. I did that in a day. Then I needed a description, which is what you see on the bookseller’s web page when you look for it on-line. I wound up doing seven versions, each with many drafts, until I finally got one which satisfied my unofficial but highly competent editor.

Now I’m ready to go. 

Except for the cover picture …