Being clever is sometimes good; sometimes it’s shit: The Secret War Files No. 4

The worst part of writing, and publishing, is the proof-reading or copy-editing stage. It’s a killer. It’s the moment that you let go of your baby and let someone else cut it up into something publishable. A moment where someone tells you that your book aint bad, but could be better.

And apart from the fact it feels like eating your own ego through a straw up your nose, it’s also intensely boring. It requires you to trawl through your book for the bazillionth time accepting or rejecting changes that could make or break a novel. And it’s for that reason the copy-editing and proof-reading stage is the trickiest part of the whole writing thang. You have to be on your game like someone concentrating on defusing a bomb, whilst at the same time sucking in your pride.

And it takes t-i-m-e. You’re not at the finishing post quite yet. Shit. At this point, it’s not even in sight.

And I’m at that stage right now with the revised version of The Secret War. And this painful part of writing has just gotten trickier as we are pioneering the use of the Kindle to do the copy-edits. And this is where it gets "geeky", because we’re eschewing the standard paper-based copy-editing for something more pixel-orientated. 
As the book will be going out as an e-book, where better to pick up errors and general editing than an e-reader?

Sounds ideal, doesn’t it, especially as the Kindle has a highlighting/annotation function. But Amazon is half-a-job. They’ve created something that could be the dream of all writers out there, but have crippled themselves by the lack of functionality available. Just like Apple...

For those not in the know, the Kindle has the ability to annotate text, to make notes and general suggestions and save them in a file called “My Clippings.txt”.

Now, what would be ideal is if you could save the text document with the notes embedded in them, kinda like “track changes” on Microsoft Word. However, Amazon have decided that’s something we don’t need, so what you get is the ability to make notes, and what you don’t get is the ability to link them to the text unless it’s on your Kindle; you can’t export the two together. BIG mistake. You would have thought this functionality would be common sense. Alas, Amazon seem to be fresh out of that.

So what I’m stuck with is this: an e-book version of the new Secret War, the Word version of that same book, and a file of notes and annotations that mean naff-all without a reference. I’m having to manually match those suggested changes onto a Word document, and each change takes around 2-5 minutes to make. Multiply that by the number of changes and you can see that just 12 would take an hour; 120 would take ten hours.

If we went back to paper, it would take almost as long because it would require posting reams of paper over to me, whilst it’s easier just to e-mail the clippings file over on a weekly basis. So there are pros in doing it the Kindle way, but boy, it’ a ball-ache and should be so much simpler (are you listening Amazon?).

~

So, inevitably there’s now a delay with the publishing date of the book. It’s been rescheduled for 20^th August, which isn’t great but I’m not going to rush it. The whole point of this endeavour was to get the book to you, the reader, in the best possible state. That means poring over all the copy-edits, matching them to each location point on the e-book and then the Word Document; and yes, it’s like having your fingernails being pulled, and my patience is tried to breaking point. But it needs to be done.

It has to be done.

Many writers fall at this stage – thinking this is the end, and it isn’t. I don’t intend to be one of them.