But I Smile Anyway…

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.     

Henry Ford

Firstly, welcome back to Spidey and his wisdom on this first Sunday of 2020!

Today he brings with him a quote full of insight.

Often, we complete a task, then find out we didn’t quite get there. The first feeling is failure. time to lament how rubbish we are, and wallow in self pity.

What if i told you that was poppycock?

Fail is not negative.

Fail is this:

F - First
A - Attempt
I - In 
L - Learning

You see, this is where you have to embrace the power of YET.

Just because you didn’t get it now, doesn’t mean you’ll never get it. It just means you need a little (or lot) more practice, and you can get there.

It’s all in the power of the mind, and your perseverence.

I nearly succumbed to the whole “I am cr@p” thing this week, after being elated at getting the proof copy of my book, Marriage Unarranged. I have read, reread, tweaked, edited, submitted for feedback, changed and reread this manuscript so many times, I was sure there would be no errors…

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Then a dear friend who is reading for review purposes came back to me with a note to say she was enjoying it, but there were a couple of niggles, with silly punctuation errors (only a few) and a couple of spelling slip ups, and that she knew how hard I had been working on this, so to make it better, to check it one more time, with a fine tooth comb.

I was, initially, devastated. How could there be any more errors? I have worked my backside off to get this baby perfect!

But she gave me a couple of examples, and when I checked, lo and behold, she was right.

Drat!

Now I really did have to go through it again, not reading the story, but looking at the mechanics. That is one of the toughest things to do. I can’t even read aloud in a monotone voice, because I am one of life’s storytellers, and as I read words, the emotions and accents come out naturally. (Ask my class and colleagues… they love me reading Rastamouse – Irie, man!)

After posting in one of the extremely supportive groups I am a member of, on Facebook, I got lots of ideas, and started looking through the book with a ruler, pen and my Post-its. Then, I pulled up the word document, and the formatted Vellum version, and corrected the errors I had been told about. And went on from there, finding a few missing full stops, or speech marks, and a couple of spelling errors that I wouldn’t have picked up easily via spell check, or grammer check, as they were real words, but not the right ones.

And one of the members offered to proof read the document again for free, in exchange for a testimonial for her business website.

Note to all wannabe writers out there: publishing a book is an expensive business at the best of times. You can get sucked in by vanity publishers, or stuck in a vicious circle of finding the best editors/cover designers/formatters etc. and find that money can leak through your pockets so fast, if you aren’t savvy. I have had to spend some, but I have to say, compared to what I have seen others mention about their spend for a book, I haven’t done badly at all. I have relied upon word of mouth, and recommendation for many services, and by being open to helping others, I have found many people willing to help me with a lot of the services that you would usually pay for. Looking it up, the average self published author will spend between $2-4000 for a book. I think my spend, once I order my author copies, including editing, cover design and some promotion, will be $1200. So, if you find anyone offering, genuinely, to help, from beta readers to covers, consider the offer carefully. It can help you cut your costs, but make sure you trust them, and are confident of their recommendations and work too.

So, now I await the feedback from my proofreader friend, then I can resubmit the files, (hoping page count doesn’t change – that affects the cover size, and my designer is on holiday, and of there are any alterations, it might mean that the paperback is delayed) and hope my version of perfection is acheived, finally!

Here’s hoping the next time Spidey visits, there will be a much improved version of my book available! It’s just not quite there, yet!

So… tell me, is there anything you can’t do, quite, YET, but are persevering over?

And, if you did want to preorder the Kindle version of my soon-to-be released book, just click on the following link – getbook.at/Marriage.Unarranged