I Still Haven't Opened the Package That Contains My Author Copy

I admit it; I'm an avoider. The Amazon package containing my paperback author copy is sitting right here next to me, and after a week I still haven't opened it.

Normal folks would tear it open with their teeth the second they pulled it out of the mailbox. Not me. I have a nagging feeling of doom. It was a real struggle for me to format the manuscript, even (or especially) with KDP's template. Don't get me wrong; I'm grateful I finally ran across it online. I'd already blown more money than I could afford buying an Atticus subscription, which in the end provided me with a product that KDP stubbornly rejected. 

And while KDP's template is decent, it's still a head-scratcher. First, the table of contents page only includes ten chapters, and adding thirty more (as I needed to do) resulted in a herky-jerky jumble of disorder. One would think the tabs would be preset, but no. I had to space ahead and space backwards, trying to line up the additional chapter titles, and in the end it was impossible, so I deleted the table of contents all together.

And, following form, the template represented ten chapters only. Now, I personally have never run across a book with only ten chapters, but I can understand that KDP wasn't about to create a mile-long template. Fine, except each of its ten chapters had a specific number of blank lines between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, so naturally, I counted the number of lines and formatted my additional thirty chapters accordingly. Of course that didn't work! I was pretty confident it wouldn't, but I had no idea how bad it would be until I stumbled upon "page view" in Word. While that helped me move my chapters up and down on the page so that a new chapter wouldn't start in the middle, but at the top of a new page, I'm still leery.

And thus, I still haven't looked at the final product, which is foolhardy, because I still have until the 25th of the month to fix it, if I need to. Except my "fixes" could make things worse.

I'm thankful that this is the last time I'll ever need to deal with creating a paperback.  

But like it or not, I'm still going to need to take a look.