Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 7

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 7

We’ve now gone through the manuscript for our new book at least 17 times and our friend George has reviewed it twice. Marcie and I went through it, cover to cover, one last time yesterday, and amazingly, still found a few corrections to be made. Hopefully, we didn’t introduce any new errors while fixing these. At any rate, we’re calling it done and are finally ready to send it off to be printed. We have several options at this point…

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 6

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 6

For me, the cover is the biggest part of the book buying decision process. If I pick up a paperback and there’s a picture of a half clad woman next to a bare chested Chippendale-built guy on the cover, I make the snap judgment that the book is a romance novel. Likewise, it’s usually easy to tell, just by looking at the graphics and title, whether the book is a murder mystery, a suspense novel or a non-fiction book. If I still think the book might be something of interest after a scan of the front cover, I’ll read the synopsis and the author’s bio on the back, and then make the decision as to whether or not to buy it.

Thus, in my mind, the cover of the book is extremely important, so let’s make it good. The process used to require a good graphics program and a lot of time. Now, however, there are some great tools to speed the process up.

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 5

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 5

Another ‘style’ we need to concern ourselves with is our grammar, spelling and usage style. For example, is ‘drop-down’ or ‘drop down’ correct? (Depends… if used as a noun or adjective, like ‘drop-down menu’ then the hyphen is correct. If used as a verb, as in “drop down and give me ten”, then no hyphen.) A style guide is a set of standards for the writing of documents that ensures consistency throughout a document, and encourages proper usage of the language.

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