REBUILDING RAFFERTY

A little this week about the nuts and bolts of bringing Rafferty back to life. And not in a Frankenstein way, I promise.

When Dad gave me the go ahead to re-release his books, the only materials I had to work with was a set of the mass market paperbacks. Dad wrote all six books on a typewriter and a 1980’s computer. Since then, the original typed pages and 5 and a quarter inch floppy disks (anyone remember those?) had long since disappeared.

Thankfully, there’s a huge range of scanning apps available which helped save me having to retype each page from scratch. But transferring the text from the scanned page to something editable wasn’t without challenges. Definitely some further work for people to do in the practical application of OCR.

Here’s a screenshot of some scanned and converted text from the first four books, prior to any editing and formatting.

So, even though this text had already been through editing, proofreading and publishing back when the books were originally released, they got a whole new dose this time around.

The process from what you see above to the finished ebook you’ve read was:

• Import the raw files into Scrivener
• Format for paragraphs, scenes and chapters.
• Clean out the obvious rubbish and retype new passages where needed.
• Line edit.
• External proofread (Shout out to my sister, Kelly, who does a phenomenal job at this!)
• Audio check and final internal proofread.

It was a heap of work. I’ve been accused of being a perfectionist in the past and this exercise has done nothing to dispel that perception, but it’s important to me that it be done correctly and to as high a quality as possible. 

I owe it to Dad and also to you, the reader.