Arrrghhh, spelling: the drama of last-minute corrections

 I've been getting ready for next Sunday's release of my first nonfiction picture book, A Boy Who Made Music: The Extraordinary Life of Joaquin Rodrigo. (I'm not including the link, because for logistical reasons I'll get into shortly, I'd rather you buy the book, if so inclined, after the current situation gets untangled.) The story is inherently dramatic: Rodrigo went almost entirely blind at the age of three, learned to love music, and became an internationally famous composer. (You may have heard his wonderful and most popular composition, "Concierto de Aranjez." Here's one of innumerable performances.)

It's a challenging story to tell in picture book form: how do you illustrate a story that essentially begins with blindness? Watercolor artist Tomasz Mikutel and I took a symbolic approach, changing from color illustrations to black and white at the moment Rodrigo and the reader discovers the consequences of his illness.

It seemed to me that public libraries were likely to be interested in Rodrigo's story, and in this picture book treatment of it in particular. So I found a list of all the public libraries in Indiana (figuring that being an Indiana author wouldn't hurt), and started contacting them. I heard back from some librarians, and one or two asked to see an ARC (advance review copy or advance reader copy, depending which basis for the acronym one prefers) before they made up their minds.

And then, one librarian who had formerly been a copy editor emailed me with many appreciative comments on the book (calling it "a great story, well written, with attractive illustrations and valuable back matter​"), asked me whether the hardcover edition would have the title on the spine (yes) . . . and pointing out that I'd misspelled "diphtheria." Somehow, I'd never noticed that (IMHO) annoying and unnecessary first "h."

I got this email on July 25th. Next Sunday, the release date, is August 4th.

Yikes.

I'm the one who put the text on Tomasz's illustrations, so I had the multilayer files and could do some chopping and rearranging and copying and pasting to add that pesky "h." Then I had to do the formatting for the various editions (Kindle, paperback, hardcover) for the various editions. (Whoops -- that reminds me I need to notify the folks handling the braille edition!) Next came the easy part: uploading the corrected files to Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) arm. That's all taken care of.

The last phase: uploading the new files to IngramSpark, which prints paperbacks and hardcovers and distributes them to a host of retailers, online and bricks-and-mortar. Their process is a good deal more cumbersome than KDP's. Adding to that complexity is some otherwise positive news: I've had some preorders, and IngramSpark prints those before even looking at submitted revisions.

So I'm waiting and hoping. Waiting for an email saying that IngramSpark has processed the new files and has an electronic proof for me to approve; hoping it happens before August 4th, and that this snafu won't lead to a period when one or more retailers shows the book as unavailable. And while I'm waiting, I'm going to share one of the two corrected spreads in the book, just in case it takes longer than planned for it to hit (virtual and other) shelves.

I'll be back soon with more about the book!