After six weeks of horsing around with the book assembler I’d hired off eLance, we broke off our professional relationship. She ends up with $500. I end up with a bunch of files that are mostly useless.

I’m reworking the kindle version now myself – nuts to her. Its like that line out of War of the Worlds, where the narrator sees how little the artilleryman has achieved in his actual plan of digging an underground stronghold for the remnants of man: “…and when I saw the work he had spent a week upon – it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to reach the main drain of Putney Hill – I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day…” And so I found that to be true. On the kindle, I’ve put in a few evenings getting things figured out and have now got the working files almost assembled. All that in 12 hours. Instead of the weeks of daily cycle of feedback and correction.

For the Createspace, it’s a little beyond me but I’m lining up bids for that and will select one next weekend.

And you can be sure that I’ve added the caveat – “final files must be in place and physical book correctly assembled before payment will be made”.

I’m not dumping a half-grand into someone’s gulf again.