Granny's gone to the printers - again!

I did it.

With trembling fingers and doubt in every bone, I pressed 'send'; the cover and text files for More Granny Rainbow are with the printer...

And you know what? It wasn't any easier second time round. I think the pressure has come because the first book was almost born out of a position of ignorance - this time, I know what I have to do to make it look even better.

I paid for an edit  because last time, I thought I'd done a good job of self-editing - and failed miserably! This time, I contacted Steph Roundsmith - she's really good - for a professional once-over. She picked up a few things I'd missed, but I was really pleased that she thought the copy I sent her was pretty clean to begin with.

Once the text had been sorted, it was on to layout...

I had laid the text out slightly different this time, because when I took Granny Rainbow to The Reading Shop, the lovely Lynne who owns the shop (a dedicated children's book shop - bliss!) advised me to centrally justify the text next time as it looked more professional. I also chose to make a bit more of the story titles; dropped them down a couple of lines and gave them a bit more space again before the story proper began.

However - the justification was an absolute PIG to get right. The template I use has the last line on the page very close to the page number, which I didn't like. So I would do a hard return and 'push' that last line of text onto the next page. For some reason, this made the new last line on that page unjustify itself, so I had a gap on the right hand side. Still not quite sure why it does that - or how I fixed it, to be honest - but I think there is one place left where I just could not get that last line to justify properly...

And of course, some of this was only noticed AFTER I'd saved the file as a pdf, so I had to go back a step to make the alterations and re-pdf-save it. (You can tell I'm really good with computers, can't you?).

I also found (thank goodness!) that I'd used an older version of one of the pictures Laura had drawn; Happy Harry didn't have his badge on!

So it was with fear and doubt I pressed the button. Now I have an anxious wait for the proof, to see if I can spot anything else I missed...