Laboring Behind the Scenes

With the semester over, a shelter-in-place order, cold and rainy weather, and two books on their way to print, I'm not exactly out hiking or biking as I might like (although even with our shelter-in-place, these are permitted if done with social distancing). I'm not short of things to do around the house, but the infamous cabin fever is finally setting in, later for me than for perhaps most people. And I just don't enjoy putting the house in order when it's terribly dim; laundry and loading the dishwasher are about the extent of it in this weather.

Usually--but not much lately--I'm writing or working on family history or reading. (OK, I'm still reading, but mainly the news, which I don't really count)

However, writers do have a lot of writing-related tasks beyond creating books, articles, and stories. These works need to be sent forth to prospective publishers (assuming one isn't self-publishing), which can take up a lot of time as one researches the different presses and their desires and open reading periods. And then, some of these also require submissions to be formatted in some special, nonstandard manner, which is annoying but a fact of life (I'm willing to do formatting once a piece is accepted, but less willing at the submission stage, although now and then I assent).

While in theory I could be sending out more work at the moment, I'm not in high gear for that, as along with the two books in the publication pipeline I've got two further novels submitted to five places, a story collection also submitted to five, and a proposal for an anthology out as well. (No, I did not write all of this overnight, this constitutes the work of more than one decade, so don't think I'm the world's overachiever.)

The tasks with which I'm presently distracting myself from stuck-in-the-house fretfulness are the kind of tasks that non-writers and beginning writers don't always realize need to be done once a book is accepted. Namely, preparing the manuscript for press and preparing what's often these days called author platform to make publicity and bookselling easier.

The copyedit stage is over for Magnetic Woman, I am glad to say, and the layout isn't yet done, so I don't currently have deadlines to meet for my publisher. For In Search of the Magic Theater, I don't have pressing deadlines either at the moment, but I do need to do some reformatting of the manuscript and check through it in a first-level author-copyedit stage so that when the publisher's copyeditor gets it, they don't have to pepper it with queries and corrections. Now, since I've worked as a copyeditor and proofreader, my own manuscripts go in pretty clean, but I always do miss stuff, as does everyone, and every press has slightly different requirements. They may want a specific font, or specific margins, or headers or no headers, or page numbering at the bottom or the top, etc. It saves copyedit time and expense if the manuscript already uses em-dashes rather than double hyphens. Likewise if the author consistently spells words the same way (grey or gray? while personally I envision these as two different shades, no publisher will agree with me).

So, I'm prepping Magic Theater in all those nitpicky ways, but also working on my online presence, creating my writerly Facebook page, my Amazon author page, my Goodreads author page, and updating LinkedIn. And some of this includes trying to fix stuff--for instance, Amazon keeps showing the wrong book cover for Magnetic Woman and so far they have not responded to my plea to correct it. Ah well! Behind-the-scenes work is never done, but rainy days during a pandemic are a good time to make a little progress.