Chris May

Finally, it's ready! There's a sense when a book arrives that your work is done. For published authors with a big marketing machine behind them that may be true. But it's only a milestone if you're self published. If writing a novel wasn't hard enough, the real work really begins right now. As I found...

I've done it! I've passed for press both the manuscript and cover. It's been checked, double-checked and triple-checked but there is always that nagging doubt that something has been missed. That I've looked at it so many times that I can't see the obvious. I remember years ago being passed a PhD thesis...

One of the first decisions I had to make was whether to use the Troubador copy-edit service. It's quite a lot of money and optional. Also my manuscript has already been through an edit process and I was pretty sure it was clean, in which case I would be spending the money for nothing. I will never not...

Unusually, perhaps, I write both fiction and non-fiction. In the next 12 months I hope to release both my second novel, The Son of Man, together with a book on digital healthcare. While based on my experience so far, I would plan to use Troubador for any fiction titles, they don't publish non-fiction...

One of the most tricky decisions throughout this process of finalising the typesetting design for my upcoming novel has been the choice of font size. The first typeset sample was in font 12 which did look too big and would have run to almost 500 pages. Font size 11 was estimated to be just over 400 ...