January 2011
My publisher, Amberley Publishing of Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, see www.amberleybooks.com , have now assigned a Project Editor to assist me to prepare the manuscript for publishing. Amberley publish about 400 titles a year and specialise in non-fiction books. They have a military publication division and have assigned a historian whose interest is in military history.
I have completed my own edit of seven of the ten chapters and am presently slightly behind schedule! I forward the chapters to my own editor who will look for errors for me to correct before submitting the manuscript by the end of February. It is a slow exhausting process and I am presently working long days, six days a week. The corrections take much longer than the free flowing process of writing.
A friend has taken over the task of getting suitable images ready. I had run into the problem of 72 dpi images (need 300 dpi for publishing), images that were too small, permission from the Government of Canada and photographers to use the images etc etc. A decision will be made shortly on whether the images will be black and white and imbedded in the writing or colour and grouped together in the middle of the book.
The end is nigh in one way as the creative writing comes to an end but it is just the beginning of the unknown publisher's requirements to produce the best edition that I can. An exciting the time as the talk turns to cover designs and author's biography for the publisher's Advanced Information package to the booksellers. I had never thought about this aspect of the book at all as I researched, wrote, filed, emailed, and interviewed this historical account of an important time in our history - the defence of Canada and North America, a similar story in Great Britain but with different players, during the Cold War.