Cliches. You gotta love ’em, and here I get to use one: Better late than never! The whole day got away from me and all of a sudden I realized it was Thursday Blog Day and I hadn’t written a word. What was I doing? I was saving more than $5,000, that’s what.

Earlier this week, I had a great conversation with my publishing consultant at Outskirts Press, and we walked through all the final details for taking my approved manuscript and turning it into a “book in progress.” There were a lot of details to get through, as she helped me fill out all the forms and make selections at my “Publishing Center” on their website. One of the options was copy-editing, that tedious but important function of finding typos and other mistakes.

Outskirts provides copy editing, but the standard fee for it is based on the average length of the books they publish. Mine is slightly longer. Like, a LOT longer. For $240, your 15,000 word manuscript is meticulously gone over, by trained copy editors who might take anywhere from two weeks to a month to complete their work. Beyond those 15,000 words, it’s 1.6 cents per word to do the editing. “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” is roughly 319,000 words. That would cost me about $5,100 and might take two long tortuous months. I didn’t see any option other than doing it myself. With all the effort we’ve put into this project, it’s pretty polished but it’s not perfect. $5,100 would’ve been a ridiculous sum to pay for a few dozen corrections.

“But you have an editor,” you say. Yes, but Greg Halling was my style editor. He kept me in line, taught me how to economically tell a good story and stay in the same “voice” from chapter to chapter. Copy editing is another thing altogether. It’s tiny detail work, where every word has to be analyzed for correctness, not style.

One pesky fact that can trip a writer up is that it’s enormously hard to copy-edit your own stuff. You know it too well, and your brain will devilishly insert words that are missing, or skip words that repeat, while not noticing things like periods and commas. The only way to do it is very slowly, literally thinking of every word you’re reading, all while looking for odd spaces or missing words. It’s slow going.

Today, I got through five chapters. I probably fixed a dozen little mistakes and noticed a few things that somehow had escaped both Greg and myself for months. Amazing that the brain can do that. Like, how did I not notice a sentence where the word “the” is written two times in a row, or how did I miss the sentence that starts out in the past tense and then switches to the present?

I had my head down all day, really taking my time and sounding it all out, when I noticed it was getting dark. “No problem,” I thought to myself. I’ll just keep working and order a pizza for delivery. And then I recalled it was Thursday. Ack!

I’m going to do all I can to get it completely fixed by the end of the weekend, despite some important sports things on TV and the fact Barbara will finally be home again for a couple of days after a week of company meetings out in Palm Springs. Just gotta keep going!

Once it’s all done for real, I’ll resubmit it as a new version of the manuscript and we’ll go straight into pre-production and layout. All along, I was so in love with the writing process I was kind of dreading this stuff, but now I’m jazzed to the limit to see the first drafts of what it will look like as an actual book, and not just text on my laptop screen. I can’t wait, but I guess I’ll have to.

And, speaking of what it will look like, Todd Myers has finished the back cover and it’s absolutely brilliant. He does masterful work and is so creative it does boggle the mind. Or maybe it moggles the bind.

We collected a number of endorsement blurbs after sending out some advanced copies of the manuscript in draft form, to important people, and I was completely humbled by the number of folks who took the time to read what we sent them and replied with such honest evaluations.

We only had room for five blurbs on the back, so the other six will be inside the book, before the forward sections. “But there’s plenty of room for more text on the lower part of the back, why didn’t you use that?” I hear you asking. That’s for the bar code and other legalese things that have to be on there in order for you to buy it. You are going to buy it, right?

Check out Todd’s work at right. To blow it up and read it, just click on it. This is getting real, people!

What’s ironically funny is that, in this version of the back cover, there’s a typo. Ha! See if you can spot it. We’ve fixed it in the final version, but totally missed it until my buddy Mike Hohler, the dude who is the producer of the SF 49ers radio broadcasts, spotted it after I showed it to him.

The color photo on the back is, of course, by Mark Rebilas. He was tracking me in Las Vegas at the fall race in 2015, before we shot the front cover photo at sunset in the staging lanes. The black and white photo was taken by a staff photographer in the Sports Information Department, at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, during my junior season as a Cougar. I had to get written permission to use both copyrighted photos, and was thrilled when both Mark and the current Sports Information Director at SIUE fired them right back, signed in all the right places.

There are a few other great photos I had been wanting to include in the book, but they are copyrighted and I haven’t been able to even find anyone who could sign off on them. That’s frustrating, but I also know I had picked far more pictures than I’d have room for, and once we launch bobwilber.net on the interwebs, I can include them on there. The website is yet another thing that I’ve planned and gotten secure, but haven’t touched yet. I’ll keep you posted…

Two other things I’ve done, after having a meeting with our tax person, were based on this new business of being a self-employed writer. I established RJW Communications as a Limited Liability Company, so it’s now officially RJW Communications LLC. And, I obtained a Federal Tax ID number for the LLC, so that I can dutifully report all its income when we start bringing in money. How much money? I have no idea. The book is so big it’s going to cost more than a “normal” autobiography to print, and I only get half the profit for online sales. I’ll make three or four bucks a book. That’s okay. I didn’t get into this for money. I got into it to write a book.

I know this is short, but now it’s 6:00 p.m. and I need to get it posted while it’s still Thursday!

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next week. I need to copy-edit a couple more chapters. Gotta fine thos tipo’s and the missing peeriods

Bob Wilber, at your service fixing little mistakes.