Deborah Cooke: Author

I have two minions slaving away on digital book files right now. Having minions do this is great – it leaves me with keyboard time to write the books that are due, but also gets those backlist books into shape.

Minion #1 has my digital files for THE COUNTESS, THE BEAUTY and THE TEMPTRESS. Unfortunately, these books were published way back when the earth was still cooling (oh, about ten years ago) and books were edited in hard copy. That means that my digital files have the version of the book that I originally delivered to the publisher. Minion #1 is adding in all of the changes made to those files – the revisions, the line edit, the copy edit and the corrections found in page proofs. It’s not fun work, but Minion #1 is rocking along.

Minion #2 has the digital file for THE LAST HIGHLANDER. This file is even older – the original book was published in 1998 – so we have the same issue with the digital file having only the text for the originally delivered book. But, in a twist which makes Minion #2 snarl, these files were also corrupted when being converted between formats over the years. About 2/3 of the book never made it to the new file format, and I didn’t notice until the original format was one I couldn’t read anymore. (I just copied the disks, lalala, converted the files, lalala, and never cross checked them. My mistake. Minion #2 has made the stupidity of my actions more than clear.) So, Minion #2 has a lot of typing to do.

I could have had these books scanned by an OCR company, but I’m hearing a lot of stories about the volume of errors created by this process. I suspect we’d end up closer to the finished book with OCR, but the Minions would still have a bunch of work to do. It doesn’t seem as if it would be worth the money. (The Minions probably think otherwise, but that’s the problem with being a Minion. You’re not in charge.)

Once the Minions are done, I’ll do a read-through of each book myself, format and publish them. That part of the process will be pretty quick – an evening each, tops – as the Minions will have done all the dirty work. I’d like to have both THE COUNTESS and THE LAST HIGHLANDER available this month, so I’m cracking the whip over my Minions.

Who do you think will be done first? Pick a Minion. Alternatively, tell me which book you’d like to have available first.

We’ll find out later this month!