The End Is in Sight

At last. A week or so ago, after two and a half years of labor, I uploaded the interior file for my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, to CreateSpace, the amazon.com company that will produce it. Back came an e-mail. There was a “properties” problem, which I decoded as a problem with page count. I resolved that; then Lindsey Archer adjusted her cover design for spine width and sent me the file.

I uploaded my interior file again, this time successfully. Another hoop behind me. I uploaded Lindsey’s cover file. A message came back, a successful upload. But then another message: some elements of the cover needed a higher resolution. Lindsey dealt with that, and it appeared we could go back through that hoop again. Then, a message from Lindsey. Another hoop. The higher dots-per-inch count resulted in a file too large to send by e-mail. My son Mike found a way around that. The cover file came through, and I uploaded it successfully to CreateSpace.

Three days later, the proof copy of the book arrived in the mail, days before I had dared to expect it. The book is in sight, which is more progress than I made in the dream of my walk with Walter Mitty (see post of June 29). How many more hoops to jump through yet before this appears in the amazon.com catalog? Surely not many.

I’m almost ready now for all those marketing hoops. Hooray? Or aw shucks? I’m not sure which.