I’m slowly working my way through the process of what all went wrong with DiC.  One of the crucial things is that LSI stopped supporting CS2 in the middle of working on it.  We had to purchase CS3.  CS3 has enough differences from it’s earlier incarnation to cause formatting errors.  Then there is the variance potential with LSI.

But there were a lot of additional problems that I have found in researching where everything went wrong.  I lay all of it at my own door.

I think I should have made time to show Rich how to do some things, since I know more about formatting and layout conversions that he did.  I made an erroneous assumption and this is what comes of it.

The problems started on Death in Common with the manuscript.  I could have headed that off if I had stepped in early and explained things to Rich that he has not yet learned about layout.

I could have saved Tim the grief of redoing it in pdf conversion that has had him agitated for months also.

I could have prevented a host of things.

I see that now.

I still do not appreciate the abusive emails from an unnamed individual.

That last part is not going to change.

Instead, I am personally going to fix everything at the manuscript stage so that it can be converted in the layout process more efficiently.

This is not a one man operation.  Things have to go through proper channels.  This one needed to go through an improper channel: me.

We established the channels and the areas that each person handles in order to expedite the work load.

However, in this case it failed.

I have done formatting for conversion to ebook layout before, so I know it well, even though I’m burned out on it.

Poetry cannot be handled in the same manner as a novel or collection.  The special formatting for poetry needs to be done initially in the manuscript stage before the conversion process of layout gets done.

In the old days, when I first started out you went from galleys to paste up.  Now it is all done with software.

This can create a few difficulties.

I am stopping everything I am doing, and delaying this month’s books to do this.