My Writing Process - Part 6 - Creating the Books

Creating the physical books can be an infuriating process, even for eBooks, that don't have a physical form.  What happens is this:  I get everything in to the template as provided by Lulu, taking it from files as I pass it through word pad to make sure I kill any weird and strange Microsoft office encoding, and then go through it chapter by chapter, making sure there are no big gaffs or fuckups in the look.  This can take up to a day or two depending on what I find and have to combat.  In putting one piece together once, I found that I had about a 20 line gap, all because the bloody thing wanted to stretch those 20 lines out into 1 line.  Thank you office 2013.  Of course I had to find the top secret code and that took an hour.  Once done, this goes off into Lulu and they make the file they use to print it.
EBooks are even more fun.  I take my print file and alter them, but the thing is, you need to have any eBook files set up suck that you can have a working index that can take you to any of the chapters.  To do this, you have to set what you want in the index as heading 1 in office.  Between office 2010 and 2013, they changed what was set for heading 1.  Lo and behold, I had to go in and change the settings, but now it works.  Now all of my files have been turned down for the same reason on the first go:  the titles didn't match with what was registered.  If you are even a word off, they turn it down.  This is why I try to publish directly at the eBook places.  And recently I have been making my own eBooks and putting them on my digital store, and had to learn how to do the metadata (thanks Clea).
So one of these days, I will get a team together that can do all this shit and leave me to write and do the primary editing.