Have Spell, Will Travel is now published. (If you’re interested in picking up a copy just scroll down and follow the Amazon link at the end of this post.) So what are my thoughts on finally getting a book out? It’s hard to summarize them but I’ll do my best.

It all could have gone a lot faster.

I was nervous about having too many pieces of the process in motion at once, a hesitation I think is perfectly understandable. So I approached launching this book in very piecemeal fashion. I ordered a cover. I got beta readers. I went through the somewhat labor intensive process of running down a program that could make .epub files and creating my own. Then I discovered half the process could have been automated.

In short, I learned a lot that I won’t have to relearn the next time I do this. But the biggest thing I learned is that I really could juggle a lot more of this process at once if I’d put my mind to it. Now, editing and formatting Have Spell, Will Travel was not the only plate I was spinning. This blog was also a part of my creative endeavors and does demand a reasonable chunk of my time, in addition to that thing known as a day job. However the climb to publishing looked a lot more intimidating beforehand. Now that I have crossed the summit I’m not so sure what it was that I was really nervous about.

When I do this again I think I’ll be able to get through it much faster. Commissioning artwork is a fairly painless process, except for the financial aspect of it, and while it does require a good idea of what you want before you start, if you have that most of the work is the artist’s share. Most artists will need a month to six weeks to return you commission, unless something goes off the rails. The artist for Have Spell, Will Travel‘s cover goes by the handle Neutronboar and he works for a reasonable rate. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

I think the biggest mistake I made in timing everything was in choosing to wait to begin assembling my revised document until I had the interior art available. That was a process I think I could have done while the artist was at work. Yes, I would have had to go through and add in the interstitial art at a later point but there are ways to make that go much faster than I had originally anticipated.

In order to convert my text document to an .epub file I used a freeware program called Calibre. It is free, which means its UI isn’t the most intuitive and the software itself is not terribly optimized but it does what it needs to do and does it quite well. It can load text files with embedded graphics and turn them into preliminary files with no fuss.

Calibre will also recognize your page breaks and can turn them into a Table of Contents for you. This means that adding page breaks is the easiest way to format your book, something I did not originally appreciate. A few hiccups in the process occurred before I realized that. There is also the option to fill your Table of Contents from the first line of each new block of text, which saves a good deal of time putting that together. Again, I did not discover this option until I had already gone through three or four revisions of the document, filling out the ToC manually. More time lost. Another mistake I hope not to make again.

I think in the future I will put together a list of places where art and page breaks need to go as a separate file. That list will then let me Ctrl+F and search the master document to immediately find the relevant spots. My first formatting pass through Have Spell, Will Travel I just scrolled through the document and added features as needed. It worked well enough but I did miss a few spots on the first pass. And once again, it took up more time than needed.

The real rub to all this is, I’m not sure reading my explanation of the errors I made and how I intend to avoid them will make sense to someone who hasn’t gone through the process yet. The process of putting together an ebook and getting it to market is full of fidgety details. Most of them I never considered until I realized I’d overlooked them. I’ve read several other people discuss their journeys to releasing their first book and I didn’t have enough context from it to understand about 80% of what I’d read. However there was one thing I heard that I did manage to apply.

At some point you have to publish the book. All through this process I continued to find minor tweaks that needed to be made and I received a lot of feedback about story direction, balance, themes and the like. Most of it I implemented as quickly as I could. However some of it, while meaningful and fair, was impossible to make use of without significantly rewriting some chapters. I gave it considerable thought then decided that no, I did not want to make the time commitment needed to revise the chapters to that extent. The time had come to publish.

There is undoubtedly some better version of Have Spell, Will Travel out there, where the pacing is tighter, the dialog is snappier, the balance of exposition and plot advancement reaches Thanos-level perfection. Searching for that version of the book would be foolish. Many would say this is because the book could very well never get published – which is not wrong – but that is ultimately not why I chose to go forward.

Time is it’s own currency and, once spent, it cannot be refunded. While quality is a powerful factor in art it is not the only factor by any stretch of the imagination. Availability is almost as important. Audiences cannot discover what is not available to them. However, even if it is available audiences may take a long time to discover your story and it’s wise of you to give them as much time to find you as you can without sacrificing other factors. Or, at least, sacrificing them as little as possible. Wringing every last drop of quality out of a manuscript is not always worth the sacrifice of time you take away from your audience. Ultimately that is what drove me to press the button and publish the book.

And that is a brief overview of everything I learned while publishing Have Spell, Will Travel. Hopefully it was of interest to you, even if you’re not looking to publish anything on your own any time soon. If you’re interested in picking up your very own copy of Have Spell, Will Travel you can find it over on Amazon by clicking this handy link: