Getting on with the next one

We've had one of those quiet chill out days, literally in some ways, as the weather has turned a bit wintry again. Not in a bad way, it's been very pleasant, especially this afternoon, but distinctly cold, with the wind from the north east.

Having seen Building Sanity Again on its way, I've been getting on with the next one, A Boater's Commonplace Book. This one is largely Sheila's work, with just a few bits here and there from your correspondent. The content is pretty well finished, and I've spent a bit of time today getting on with the formatting. First I generated a set of hyperlinks from the headings in the contents page to the relevant sections of the book, then converted the whole thing to an ePub and moved it into Sigil to generate the chapter divisions and the like.

I also made an image for the cover from a photo of Sanity Again cruising up the Soar (the June calendar picture, in fact) and added the book title and authors' names to it. That was inserted at the start of the book, before converting the file again to .mobi with Kindle Previewer. This lets me check that it looks basically OK, and we have now loaded it onto both our Kindles.

The next stage is a bit of a plod, but very necessary; that's to read the whole thing on the Kindle, using its Notes facility to mark up any typos, or just places where the phrasing could be improved. Those emendations will then be made in Sigil, before regenerating the .mobi file to upload to the Kindle Direct Publishing site.

It will take another week at least, I expect – it's no good trying to rush this stage, you just miss stuff, so it's a case of doing a bit each day and stopping as soon as you get tired or start skimming over the text. That's more of a risk for Sheila who wrote it; it's mostly new stuff to me, so I'll hopefully be going more slowly through it.

By three o'clock we  were a bit jaded, so took a walk round the marina in the bright but cold sun.