Final editing of the self-publishing process is done...The Residents of Romiley Road are nearly upon us!

The past week has been intense as I received the proof copy of the book and set about reading it from cover to cover (for what feels like the 20th time at this point) with a notebook beside me to jot down anything that was obviously incorrect or that perhaps wasn't quite right. Here are some of the errors I found:

"The continued..." (should have been They")

"We are once again at the Duke of York.." (I had shuffled the chapters...this was our first visit)

"working class" (should be hyphenated)

"book keeper" (bookkeeper)

"Sunday School" (Sunday school)

I'm fairly sure there will still be the odd error but I'm happy I have corrected the most obvious ones. I hadn't realised quite how many times I say working-class until this process (34 times). Nowhere near as many times as "Romiley" (450 apparently!!). The most common first names in the book are James (305) and Mary (287) and the most common surname is Robinson with 117 appearances. "Hat"(101) beat "Cotton"(98) by 3 appearances. And of course "death" makes 121 appearances!

If you can't wait another month for a read of the book, I currently have it listed on Booksprout where you can receive a free copy of the ebook in return for an honest review. This is the pre-edited version so you can have fun spotting all the incorrect capitalizations.

I must warn you all that the book is quite a sad one. I almost cried on at least 3 occasions and I've read it before (and written it). I did try to balance the sadness with happy stories, but if I'm being honest, I have failed in that respect. It was a tough time.

Here are some things I have learnt from the process:

• Add in tables at the end - they make formatting really difficult

• Don't use different fonts for different sections

• Set up the indents as a default FIRST. I spent literally hours manually checking each chapter.

• Don't use double indents - they look fine on Microsoft Word A4 but look ridiculously large on a paperback

• Keep careful track of which version is which - having "Romiley Road 3rd edit" and "RR final copy" is confusing

• Don't rush when uploading the files to publishers. I ended up having to resend them all about 5 times as I kept spotting tiny issues.

I'm going to (try to) take a short break from Romiley Road now as my brain has turned to mush but I'll be back very soon to add some more households to the website.

You can pre-order the ebook in a few places and soon I think you'll be able to pre-order the physical book too. Weirdly, as of today you can pre-order the paperback from Barnes and Noble in the USA.