Formatting

If you've read my last couple of posts, I’ve gone into the editing process and a bit about finishing up the first draft of Dirty Hit. Now, I want to talk about formatting the book.

I’ve done it both ways - formatted the manuscript myself into the ebooks and paperbacks you read, and I’ve also hired a designer to do it for me.

I love hiring a designer (I worked with Dee from Black Widow Designs on Beautiful Carnage and Sweet Destruction as well as Fallen Star), but the problem with it is I don’t have access to the raw file, so if something comes up and I need to change what’s called back matter (the links at the end, acknowledgements, etc.) I have to reach out and it’s a whole thing to change something relatively simple.

I also have the formatting software to do the formatting myself (I use Vellum), but I’m not a designer so the ones I format just aren’t as pretty as the ones a professional does.

But with Dirty Hit, I’m going to format it myself, so I thought I’d share what that looks like.

First, I go through the manuscript and figure out which chapter belongs to which character.

The reason I do this is because I like to have custom graphic headers for every chapter of my book. The formatting program has built in options, but I don’t like how generic they look so I design my own.

Next, it’s off to Photoshop.

I start by coming up with an idea. For this book, the eBook is going to match the style of the man chest cover instead of the alt cover. So, I look over the cover for inspiration:

For this cover, a few things stuck out that I wanted to explore in the chapter headers. First, I always try to match the cover fonts on the inside chapter headers, so I knew I’d be using the same font as the title. I also liked the rough ice texture and the city of Seattle in the background. Those things were my inspiration, so I took the idea to a stock photo website and started searching out elements.

These are the three stock images I used to create my headers. I played around with them a lot, but this is what I finally settled on:

I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Now I have to go through and make a new image for every single chapter. This book has 62 of them, so that’s 62 individual images. Once that’s done, the design aspects for the eBook will be ready to go when I get the manuscript back from all the editing parts.

I’ll post about the process as I go, but for now we wait.

The Process

I thought I’d give you a little peek behind the curtain of what goes on when I finish a book, so here goes…

You can read my previous post about when I finished writing the first draft of Dirty Hit if you’re curious about how it wrapped up. Once I had the first draft done, I didn’t waste any time. I decided a couple of months back to give pre-orders a try again for both Dirty Hit and Perfect Nightmare because it’d been a while and I thought it might be motivating to help me write faster.

It’s really not. All it does it stress me out like crazy. So, after those two books it’ll be a long, long time before I consider putting up pre-orders again. To me, getting the book right is more important than any timeline to release it. I want my books to be the best they can and that means not cutting corners.

Thankfully, the first draft of Dirty Hit was done with enough time to spare that I can do it right.

So what is “doing it right”?

First, I take a read through the entire manuscript. I take notes as I go of things that are inconsistent or words or phrases I notice that I’ve repeated way too many times. (In the case of Dirty Hit, I used the phrase “makes me” almost 70 times. Yikes. For example, “When he looks at me like that, it makes me want to jump his bones.”

This process took me 10 days this time around, including a couple of days I had to take off for migraines. I finished it up late last night.

Once that’s done, the file goes to my beta readers. For this book, I’ve got five of them. They each get their own copy of the file to make notes on. I ask them to point out things they love, things they hate, and anything that takes them out of the story.

After they finish, I go through and read all of their comments file by file. Then I tweak/edit the manuscript to reflect any changes I think need to be made based on the comments I’ve gotten.

Finally, the file goes to my editor where the manuscript goes through multiple rounds of edits and changes. I have ADHD so I really struggle with timelines. My editor does a great job of keeping the timelines of my books straight because otherwise they’d be a whole damn mess.

When the book’s gone through multiple rounds of edits, it’s then ready to format. I’ll make another post about that at some point as I get to it.

So, right now we’re in the “beta readers” stage of getting this book out into the world, and it can’t go fast enough. I’m impatient at the best of times so having to wait to get this book into your hands is driving me crazy.

But a little nugget you might be interested in: There are a few Savage Society cameos in Dirty Hit. You’ll see Romeo, Grave, and Wraith make an appearance in this book. Any theories as to what that means or what they’re doing?