I had never done anything like this before. I had no idea how to do it. I didn’t have help from anyone (except for the design of the cover by my incredibly talented niece—a help so huge that without it, I never would have entertained the idea of even starting in the first place). The layout of the book made it so that every page was essentially a new chapter, which meant every page (380 of them) required A TON of format - ting I had no idea how to do. Helping me along this steep learning curve was a 16-page “paperback interior formatting” guide provided by the self-publishing platform I used, with frightening and foreign-sounding (to me) terms and phrases like “mirror margins” and “preserve font fidelity.” It’s a good thing I had no idea how hard it would be for me to figure this out (a year-long process, as it turned out), because if I’d known that when I started, I never would have started at all. By the time I did figure it out, I was too far in to turn back. I had to finish. So, I cried (some more) and kept on. I spent entire days on the most minor of details. I messed up royally on some parts and had to start all over again. Even when I thought I was done, I had to go back to square one on of the most crucial, visible elements.
GUILTY CHOCOHOLIC MAMA
CHOCOLATE AS ART.
YOU CAN DO THIS!
by Elizabeth Spencer
L ast year, I did a hard thing that I didn’t know how to do that scared me to do that I wasn’t at all sure I actually could do. (Disclaimer: I promise I am not telling you this to toot my own horn. I’m sharing this because I truly believe something powerful, I learned along the way might be helpful to someone else along their own way.) The hard (for me) thing I did was self-publish a book. (Disclaimer 2: I am telling you specifically what I did only because I know if I was reading an article like this and the person writing it didn’t tell me
what it was, he or she’d done, I’d spend the entire time yelling, “Well, what did you do?!!”) (Disclaimer 3: I am 100% not telling you this to sell the book. I just didn’t know how to share the part I think might be helpful without filling in a few very minor details so we can get to what really matters. In saying that, onward and forward.)
DancingLion.us 917 Elm St. Manchester, New Hampshire info@dancinglion.us 603.625.4043
“I had never done anything like this before.”
111 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
110 SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022
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