Proof copies of Dr Dan arrived a day early. The cover looked okay. Worth a tweak or two, but alright. Then I peeped inside. Aaaaarrrrgh….. it was a dog’s breakfast. Chapter breaks missing, front matter in the wrong sequence. It looked like a book assembled by a team of monkeys.

So I spent the next 12 hours, heart in mouth, re-formatting the text, re-submitting it, addressing the problems that came boomeranging back to me from the automated system. And so on. That’s the thing about self-publishing. There’s no-one at the end of a phone to whom you can sob, ‘But exactly how do I embed my fonts?’

I think I’ve now fixed everything. I’ll know on Wednesday when new proofs should arrive but by then, if I’ve made another hames of it, it’ll be too close to my deadline to do much about it. I can only hope that my readers will forgive me if it looks like a book I put together on my kitchen table. Because actually, that’s precisely what I’ve done.

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