The Popish Midwife

Retrieved, Rescued, Repaired and Republished

English author Annelisa Christensen — my dear friend and colleague of many years — beat me to the punch: She got her historical fiction novel The Popish Midwife published weeks ahead of me! But after encountering issues with her original publisher, she decided to retrieve her work from that publisher and republish her novel independently.

The original publisher released her work, but only in the form of a single publisher-created PDF file, one that contained a number of text errors apparently generated by the publisher during the formatting process. Unfortunately, some of those errors made it into the previous print editions. Yikes. And so began a new focus area for my business: “Book Rescue.”

Despite being nearly 6,000 miles apart — I’m in California, while Annelisa is in England — I worked with her effectively and efficiently, supplying design and layout drafts electronically across the miles, going back-and-forth until I had reached a design that pleased her eye and exceeded her expectations. I combined MS Word and Scrivener to retrieve more than 400 pages worth of precious text from the PDF, and from there I began seeking and correcting those formatting errors. Finally, I built a new InDesign template for the book meeting CreateSpace standards, while also creating a new edition for Kindle, each carefully corrected and looking really good.

Her reaction? “I should have worked with Tim from the beginning.” She also wrote for LinkedIn.com an excellent recommendation of my services:

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