The last couple of months of 2015 have flown by. Since November I have hardly read a word on my Kindle. My last trip away from home was in the middle of November and that's the last time I even picked up the thing.

It wasn't due to laziness, nor being fed up with reading, but I've been working so hard on getting my book 'Bring me the head of Turlington Jones' made into a paperback book.

Back in May when the finished ebook went on a soft release to test the literary water for this story, I decided to see where I'd be in a year and see if the reviews were good etc. before publishing it as a paper book. Well it didn't quite take a year and with a lot of research I decided to launch the title as a paperback .

I thought it would be a quick and easy task, I am after all an art editor and know my way around Indesign and creating pdfs, but the process has turned out to be anything but quick.

There is a massive physiological barrier between publishing an ebook and publishing a real one. I will document the process in a future blog post, but wanted to write about how I felt during the process.

I am nearly at the end and am just awaiting for the printers to return to work after the Christmas break and then it will be all systems go for the new year. 2016 will, for me at least, be the year of Bring me the head of Turlington Jones.

When I started, I thought it would be a case of making the ebook into a print ready pdf and away I'd go. It wasn't.

I had decisions to make on font, font size, page size, pagination, margins and page layout. I basically had to create a publication from scratch. My first few attempts saw me being too creative and I received error messages on the digital proofs. So I turned to a more basic format and this worked.

I may have had the words, but nothing else was similar to the ebook. The reader chooses the font and font size on an ereader, so I didn't have to. And it took a while to hit on the right font and size combination. What I thought would be a straight-forward process turned into a full blown Art Director role.

Once the font and size issues were sorted I moved onto widows and orphans. I see quite a few books these days that don't seem to worry about widows or orphans, but I come from the old days of magazine design when these things were always taken care of. Even highly crafted words can be tweaked to take care of a one word line at the end of a para or even worse at the top of a page. It just gives a neater more considered look. Sometimes it is as simple as tracking back the kerning by a point or two, other times it involves removing an extraneous word or even changing a sentence. It takes ages especially when it's not your main job and is done in your spare time and there are over 400 pages to go through.

With the inside of the book done, I turned to the cover. The front is the same as the ebook, but I had the back to consider and more importantly, design-wise anyway, the spine.

These things took time to get right and the spine width is critical and can only be confirmed once the inside page count is complete. Christmas was knocking on the door by the time I had everything ready and I had to put the book on hold to get the holidays out of the way. However, the break gave me breathing time as you shouldn't under estimate the pressure that hitting the 'submit' button generates. This is a big deal. It's scary and exciting and I was actually glad of the week Christmas holds still in the year. It's given me a chance to come to terms with the enormity of the moment and to steady my nerves. The next time I write a blog post I will be the author of a paperback book.