I’ve been busy working on Vanity Killed.

 First, last clichés:

Ahead of the Pack— Doing better than the others, in advance of the rest of a group. Pack refers to a group of people since the 1400s, but for about 400 years it was a derogatory connotation as in “pack of thieves.” A related phrase would be “ahead of the game.”

Down to Earth—Realistic, practical, forthright. Term dates from the first half of the 20th century. See the Canadian Forum in 1932.

Draw a Blank—Unable to find something or remember something. Refers to a losing ticket in a lottery, which has no number printed on it, i.e. it’s blank. Appeared in print in early 19th century.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my blog, I always embed clichés into the body of my work. Then, the next post, I will tell you what I used and what they mean. So, how many did you find?

I received my second proof of Vanity Killed and I started converting the manuscript to e-book format. However, when I did that, the conversion caught a few spelling errors, that nothing else had caught. So, I’m redoing the pdf file for my paperback in CreateSpace!

So how do you convert your book to e-book?

1.  I copied and pasted the word document into another file and marked it for e-book.

2. Then I deleted the headers and footers.

3. I deleted any scene markers and made sure all were double spaced, where rest of body was single spaced.

4. In word, I put the document in full screen and edit page mode—I checked the view option on the right top and edit mode. Then I went through and made sure there were no spaces other than the scene changes.  Why? Because when I converted to CreateSpace book format, I made sure that the top line of every page had more than one sentence. So that lead to having some spaces created where there should not have been.

5.  I had to change the ISBN numbers to my e-book numbers not the print on demand book numbers.

6. Then I prepared a table of contents. You can check on Kindle e-book on how to do that.

7. For all of the chapter headings, I made sure they were all the same “style” and correct font and size –make sure they are all the same to pass muster.

I don’t want to rub it in, but I did all of this and now it’s time to upload it. The conversion will tell me whether I toed the line.

Next time, I will let you know the best or worst-case scenario.

Until then, Keep Writing,

Julie