Publishing in any form is a journey each time with its own learning curve. I published a book of poetry on my own last year and learned several things about formatting the ebook, though I don’t think I got it quite perfect for all the different ways it can be viewed. I was, however, very happy with the print copy.
This time around I’ve been working with an editor that my publishing house, Tirgearr, assigned me. Author and editor, Lucy Felthouse, has kindly answered any questions I had. I was quite concerned by the sheer number of changes in the first draft but she told me to take it one at a time, and it went pretty quick. The second one went even faster. (The final read through still caught a number of things I hadn’t noticed before.)
One thing that I learned from her was in regards to the use of ellipses in an ebook. I had learned that the proper format for an ellipsis was space/period/space/period/space/period/space, with an additional space/period if the ellipsis came at the end of a sentence.
I noticed that Lucy was eliminating the initial space after the word. I asked why that was, if there was a different style guide that I should be referring to than I was used to?
She explained that the reason she eliminated the space was because in publishing an ebook, if the text wraps around, the sentence can become disassociated from the ellipsis and that can cause a great deal of confusion. I will remember that in the future.
Now, my book has been turned in to my publisher, and I await the next step!
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