Think You’re Done? What about the Extras?

I’ve seen very little written about the “front matter” of a book. It’s not enough to slave for months (sometimes years) to write a book. Just when you think you’re in the clear, the book has been copy-edited and is clean, clean clean (if not, contact Anneli Purchase), and will be published soon, you realize you have to face all the writing for the front matter of the book – the part before the story begins.

You need to have a title picked out. That in itself can be a nightmare. You may think you’ve got the perfect title thought out and then you type it into the search space on amazon only to find there are already 18 other books listed by the same title. Back to the drawing board.

Then there is the matter of copyright. That is the least difficult. Once you tell the world that the following is your work and yours alone, your work is considered your own. In Canada you send  the information about your book (title, number of pages, subject area, date of publication, etc.) to Library and Archives Canada, and you will receive the exact information that is to appear on the copyright page, including an ISBN.

Next, the dedication of your book. Who would be flattered to have your work dedicated to them? Who is deserving of the honour of being named  in the front matter of your magnum opus? 

Then come the acknowledgements. Very important! Don’t forget to thank those lovely people who were your main support throughout the struggle of writing this wonderful book, those “without whom this book would never have been written.” But maybe you can think of some more original way to say it.

Unless you have a prologue, the front matter is basically done, but there is one more headache waiting for you. Two actually. You need to come up with a cover description – a paragraph telling the reader what your book is about. The trick will be to make them want to take the book home and read it. You will also need to make a shortened version of this enticing description for advertising purposes, in some cases for a flap jacket, or maybe next to the book cover image on the amazon page where your book is for sale.

And of course this all assumes that you have a cover image for your book already prepared. (If not, call Anita B. Carroll.)

When all is done, you can relax at last. Ha, ha. Just kidding! That is when the work begins. This is the part most authors would love to do without – the marketing. But whole books have been written on that subject alone and I won’t try to tackle it in this post.

Find and Replace

When I have a long piece of work to edit, enhance, and rewrite, it helps to use the technology available to me. My tech savvy is only moderate, but I’ve learned to make good use of some of the functions available to me.

One of my favourite tools in Word is Find and Replace.

Suppose I am reading over a section of my writing and I’ve just realized that my Constable Andersen mentioned near the end of the book is spelled “sen” and elsewhere in the manuscript I’m sure I had it spelled Anderson with the “son” ending. Now I’m wondering how many more times I’ve spelled it Anderson, and where in my manuscript might those instances be?

Luckily, using Word, I don’t have to read the whole ms to look for “Anderson.” That’s what Find and Replace is for.

I go to the beginning of my ms and click on the Home tab. On the far right, I see a tiny set of binoculars with the word “Find” beside it. I click on “Find” and in the navigation window that drops down, I can type in the word I’m looking for.

I type in “Anderson,” the word with the wrong spelling (for the purposes of my novel). Word will automatically take me to each case of “Anderson” when I click the up or down arrow. At each stop, I have the option of going into the text to change the spelling to “Andersen.”

If I had a change to make that involved more than just a few words, I could use the Replace option to do the work for me. Depending on which version of Word you have, you can either click on Replace (under the binoculars on the right), or, in older versions, click on the Replace tab in the window that opened when you first clicked “Find.”

It’s a fast and easy way to be sure to find all instances of some mistake you may have made.

Watch out for a funny thing that can happen when you are using Replace.

Let’s say you were changing one of your characters from a girl to a boy. Every time you have referred to the girl you’ve said “her.” Now that you are using a boy, you want those words to say “his,” not “her.”

But beware. Find will show you all cases of “her,” even if it is only a part of a longer word. If you changed all cases of “her” to “his,” you might end up with a new spelling nightmare with “mother” changed to “mothis” and “there” changed to “thise.” As I’ve discovered, there are many words with the letters “her” in them.

Definitely use Find, but use Replace more carefully.