Hello

The copyediting of Kill the HiPPO is finished. The copyeditor was extremely nitpicky. Across the 100-ish pages of manuscript, she made 3,000+ suggested revisions!

Many of these suggestions were trivialities about punctuation and word choice. Many other revisions were converting our British-ish English into US English - the copyeditor said that in tech books the convention is to use US English. So every prioritise became prioritize.

But amongst the trivialities, the copyeditor made some helpful suggestions that led to stronger and clearer writing.

I've also completed the interior page layout. This was much easier than I expected due to an awesome piece of software called Vellum. The result is that the manuscript looks like a real book now. Take a look:

The pre-publication todo list is shorter:

• Copyediting to strengthen the prose DONE!
• Proofreading to fix typos and grammar
• Final review readers to gather pre-launch testimonials
• Finalise illustrations DONE!
• Interior page layouts for paperback, ebook, and PDF DONE!
• Get some ISBNs - I need separate ones for each format (e.g. paperback, Kindle)
• Create cover images - extremely important because people do, actually, "buy a book based on its cover"
• Set up print-on-demand (almost certainly using Amazon)
• Create an Amazon book page that sells

I'm striving to get all this done by the end of March 2026.

Until next time,

Steve
​​​killthehippo.com​​