Human life is filled with milestones. Some are arbitrary, like turning a certain age significant to our culture. Some are personal and mean little to anyone else, but common enough that others can relate to to them.

This week, my family experienced the end of an era. Sparky died.

Sparky (a.k.a. Sparks or Sparkles or Sparky-doodle) came into our lives when my son Brian was in kindergarten. My husband took Brian and his brother, Matthew, to the county dog pound and let them each pick out a kitten. Matt brought home a small gray kitten he named Tiger. Brian picked out a beaiutfil, lilac point, Siamese-type kitten. We learned then that it’s best to get kittens in pairs, because they play with each other.

Tiger passed away when he was seven. Matt died when he was 24. Brian and Sparky hit their 24th and 19th birthdays respectively this year. Nineteen is really old for a cat, although I’ve seen and heard about older cats.

Sparky raised many of our other cats. He served as “good old Uncle Sparky” to Guido, Sally, Brutus, and Alice. Guido was good enough to take over kitten rearing for Muffin who then assumed the “uncle” mantle for Cooper. (Guido, by the way, is a jerk. Muffin and Cooper are obnoxious, too.)

When Sparky moved permanently into the kitchen and became the “kitchen kitty,” his small world became much smaller. Whether he’d had a stroke or was simply going senile, he’d get lost if he wandered beyond the kitchen. He stuck to familiar territory, mapping out a path to the litter box and a path to the sink. He refused to drink water from a bowl; so we learned to turn on the faucet and leave it at a thin trickle so he could drink. When he was hungry, he’d yowl. Loudly.

When he was about 14 year old, I began feeding him canned cat food to supplement his lifetime diety of dry kibble. He was picky. Not only did he have firm preferences with regard to dry cat food, but we learned to cater to his wet cat food preferences. He would only eat pate. Not morsels, shreds, or any other consistency. He only liked certain brands; luckily for us, the cheaper brands sufficed. He only liked certain flavors: some he consistently disliked and others he disliked only sometimes. Until lately, he’d still snack on dry cat food. Amazingly, he still had all his teeth.

Making the decision to end a pet’s life is never easy. It hurts. However, Sparky had been on the decline for years. His beautiful blue eyes deteriorated first, a holdover from his Siamese heritage. Then his body weakened and his balance worsened. Several months ago he stopped using the litter box. Last week he lost the strength and coordination to walk. Over the weekend, he lost interest in food and water, but not affection.

I decided it was time to say goodbye and let him go gently into that good night. (Apologies to Bob Dylan.)

Sparky was the last pet remaining from my childrens’ childhood. We have other pets, but none go back as far in our family’s memory as this gentle old cat.

Good-bye, old buddy. You will be missed.

When it comes to self-publishing, many authors entertain the misconception that the term means “do it all yourself.” Actually, what self-publishing means is that the author publishes his or her own work instead of going through a traditional publisher.

A traditional publisher employs or hires professionals to massage a manuscript into shape, something suitable for public consumption. Whipping a manuscript into shape entails tasks such as developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, proofreading, cover design, and book design. When an author self-publishes, that means the author is responsible for all the tasks performed by a traditional publisher.

I’ve said ad nauseum that authors should not rely upon themselves for editing. Trust me. I’m an editor and I learned that lesson the hard way. A manuscript benefits from an editor’s objectivity and fresh perspective. Also, editors do different things. A developmental (or structural) editor takes a bird’s eye view of the story and doesn’t concern himself with the nitty gritty details of grammar and context. A copy editor isn’t responsible for detecting and correcting plot holes. A line editor often bridges the gap, but is more concerned with how the author writes what is meant than with either big picture items or correct punctuation. Then we have substantive editors like me who don’t separate developmental, line, and copy editing, giving the manuscript to a holistic treatment. Finally, there are proofreaders who put the final polish on a manuscript, correcting errors before it goes public.

As the author is too close to his or her own manuscript to see its flaws, so, too, is the author is primarily a writer, not a graphic artist or graphic designer. These are much different skills from writing, and few authors do design really well. Just like editing, it’s best to hire cover art to the pros who know the genre, understand the tenets of effective cover art, and have the technical skills to render an appealing image that conveys the genre and the story. If you haven’t noticed, genres tend to have their own distinct design trends and rules. A font you might use on the cover of a horror story probably isn’t something you’d use on the cover of a cozy mystery.

The graphic design aspect of producing a book involves more than filling the pages with text, especially if your manuscript includes charts, graphs, and images. A book designer considers paragraph justification and page justification, widows and orphans, kerning and leading, and more. The juxtaposition of title fonts and body text must be complementary as well as easy to read.

Each of the major components of producing a book–editing, book design, and cover art–involves disparate skills that appear to be related and generally aren’t mastered by any one person, much less by most authors. This means that producing a top quality book demands a team effort. When an author decides to self-publish, the author is responsible for hiring the professionals to do what she or he cannot do or does not do well. Lucky for those authors, the gig ecnonomy teems with feelance editors, designers, and artists.

These professionals don’t work for free. In fact, their combined services add up to a signific.ant chunk of change. Because they don’t work cheaply, traditional publishers only pay authors a small percentage of revenues received from book sales. The publishers have to pay these pros regardless of whether the books they produce sell. If you’re self-publishing, the freelance pros you hire expect to be paid for their work regardless of whether your book generates any profit.

Self-publishing isn’t free. Not really. You can produce a book and publish it without spending any money on hiring the professional services that will elevate your book to the next level, but that doesn’t mean you should. For best results, hire and pay for those services. Yes, you’ll have to dig into your pockets, probaby deeply, so start saving now before you’re ready to hire those pros.

Self-publishing isn’t really “do it yourself.” The author writes the story, but making it marketable depends on a team of paid professionals.

Hen House Publishing provides ghostwriting, editing, proofreading, and book design services to assist independent authors on their

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