Hello, fellow campaigners of the writing world! A. F. Kopp here, and WOW, two weeks in a row I’ve updated my blog. Now that is a miracle.
I have some exciting news today now that I’m working on my book formatting. You read that right, I am FORMATTING my book, The Hope of Hattie Phelan! I’ve been working on this book since 2016, so that is seven years in the making. However, a lot of it was me not knowing what era to write it (between 2016 and 2019 I fluctuated between the 1870s to the 1910s, so it’s been a long process), but now I am happy to say that we are CLOSEEEE to getting this baby out to the public. I’m thinking of the first half of 2024.
The Formatting Process
So, as of writing this, I have Part One (Spring 1886) of my book edited, and I decided that I would start formatting the final version so that I can get one step closer to publication.
I luckily dabbled in the template of the formatting back at the beginning of the year, so now that the hard work is done for me, I can just make sure that everything looks good, written letters are formatted correctly, and time-skip icons are all placed accordingly.
I opted for a more simplistic approach to the formatting which is a sharp contrast between my ideas for my sci-fi book. I think since I’m publishing this historical fiction first, it’s good training for what to do with more complex formatting, and eventually, I want to offer formatting for pay. But I want to get better at it first.
I think that this is an exciting part of the journey of writing because it means I’m one step closer to the publication process and can do something besides the monotonous editing, haha. So, I was able to do four chapters or so in around one hour. To get the correct formatting (e.g. italics) I had to make separate documents on Google Docs for each chapter, download the .docx, input it into Adobe InDesign, and make sure it is all in the templated font, font size, etc.
Below is a picture of two pages side-by-side to show how it would look with an open book. I showed the page with the time-skip picture. Since the book begins and ends with a train (and it is a common theme in getting a train ticket), I decided to take the train from my front cover concept and make it black for the divider. I am happy with how it looks especially when I didn’t plan for this to be the divider. I was going to illustrate one, but this works out perfectly.
I rather enjoyed the process of formatting thus far. I hope to keep you all updated on the publishing process because I don’t like to be alone in this.
Thanks for reading!
Salutations, fellow adventurers!
Respectfully,
afkoppauthor.com 