Perseverance
Do you feel like running a victory lap with me? We should do it!
Almost nine months ago I handed off my novel, Battle for the Round Tower, to be converted into an electronic book. This is normally a process that takes between 5-9 business days.
Except, this was anything but a normal experience.
Initially, the proof files of the book had missing and/or irregular italics. One of my goals with Battle for the Round Tower (BRT) is to demonstrate how thought, leading, and temptation occur so the mind-game battling between flesh and spirit is visible. To accomplish this, I used italics. Without the italics, or with them misplaced and irregular, BRT was meaningless.
Ultimately, I discovered my first novel, No Mercy, suffered similar issues. What was supposed to be a straightforward conversion process was now compounded and my publishing timeline in disarray. There was money involved—a fairly significant sum to me. That became an unpleasant, unfortunate dispute, but after several weeks the financial conflict was resolved better than I could have imagined.
There was a second conversion company.
Then there was a third company, Create Space, a subsidiary of Amazon. They were able to resolve the italic problem, but other irregularities manifested themselves. Malden Creek became Maiden Creek. Off became of. Such became suck. Hank, the main character, became Hark. Hank’s nemesis in the book, Jester, became Fester, and fester (with a lowercase “f”). There were missing quotation marks, additional quotation marks, misplaced inside quote marks. There were missing periods, commas in place of periods, missing apostrophes, and so forth.
And get this: The above errors were irregular and random. In other words, not all occurrences of Hank became Hark, not all occurrences of Jester became Fester, and not all of the apostrophes were gone. Further, with each editorial effort the nature, number, and location of the errors changed.
Folks, computers don’t do random and irregular. They especially don’t do irregular and random in files as simple as ebook files.
The conversion files were escalated from the experts at Create Space to the experts inside Kindle (Amazon’s ebook division). I’ve not counted how many conversion efforts were made. I’m guessing somewhere close to 40 or so. That’s a lot of editorial reading.
None of these experts has ever seen anything like what was manifesting itself inside BRT and NM. They could see the mistake but could not find the coding error. Why these irregularities were occurring was/is a complete mystery.
At a basic level, a series of compounding, irregular, and random errors rendered the ebook for Battle for the Round Tower and No Mercy unreadable and un-publishable. Until now.
Until now. Wow. What a haul the last nine months have been.
Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I published the electronic book of Battle for the Round Tower. It’s available to you in both a paperback and electronic version.
Personally, given the subject matter of these books, I attribute the slogging, demoralizing, editorial experience of the last nine months to spiritual warfare. I don’t subscribe to random, so what else could it be? The wizard of Oz was not happy when the curtain was pulled back on his shenanigans and I don’t expect the devil is thrilled that I have pulled the curtain back on his exploits.
Of course, every author feels their writing is important. But this book? The story of Hank Henderson in general? There is little doubt that this is a story contended over, with a message important enough to have a mysterious editorial process, and a release date markedly later than planned due to events never-before-seen.
What should have taken seven days instead took 260. I’m tired from the editorial scavenger hunt. But, I’m exultant that Battle for the Round Tower is available to you in paper and ebook formats. The ebook for No Mercy will not be far behind.
If after reading Battle for the Round Tower you find the fight to publish it representative of the message received, would you please recommend it to others? Would you purchase copies as gifts? Would you write a short review at Amazon? Would you talk about it at Facebook, LinkedIn, and with your friends and colleagues? Thank you in advance for doing this.
I will let you know as soon as the ebook for No Mercy is available. I’m hopeful it will be ready before Christmas. Of course, the paperback version of both books is available now.