Coding (data science applications) is my day job as well! Please send me a note when you self-publish your novel, I'll buy a copy. My email address is in my profile.

Thanks I took a note of it. Once I publish I'll send you a link to a free copy. I've been writing since I was a kid and just recently discovered how enjoyable it is working on this novel.

with respect, i find the contentions that slavery and overt racism have been wiped out to be highly dubious.

I don't entirely disagree hence the word 'mostly'. What I really meant is that attitudes have shifted over a hundred or so years.

Draft2Digital is much less of a pain. They'll even handhold problematic manuscripts through the process.

I checked out D2D. Although an awesome idea on the surface, I'm a bit suspect of their pricing model. 10% of all sales? The problem with that is if you have a bestseller that sells a million copies you're basically subsidizing other books with languishing sales.

I'm not sure if you're affiliated with them or not, but a better model would be to charge 10% up to the cost of proofread and copyedit + a profit. Let's say these services typically cost $3,000 (like on CreateSpace). D2D could charge 10% of sales up to say $5,000 ($2k profit). If you're book doesn't hit its targets the author would still owe a remaining balance up to $3,000.

This would all make sense if D2D were a publisher. It's a distributor like Smashwords. I doubt the hits are doing that much subsidizing. eBooks are tiny files, and storage is cheap. All they did was clean up the .doc file for one book and keep on Apple when they gave me trouble publishing another. That's what I meant by handholding the manuscript.