Hey Folks,
So, I thought I've give you some updates on what's going on with my book. I'm not doing this as a plug, rather I think that few of us have had the opportunity to write a book on CP, so I thought I'd tell you what the experience has been like.
Here is the current status. The book is INDEED going to be published. About 10 days ago I was shipped the first draft of the completed layout for the book in two massive chunks. The kind folks at the publishing house asked me to return to them the entire set of revisions in about 5 days. Eeesh! After months of sitting around waiting, I had to jump into hyperdrive. This is what the publication process has been like: classic "hurry and wait, hurry and wait."
Well, I looked over the first version and saw they had done a fabulous job with the layout. They did not have any problem with a couple of things I was concerned about, i.e.
1)The use of Latin names.
2)The clear acceptance of evolution in the text (crazy this is even an issue)
3)The acceptance of the occasional sly joke
Interestingly, they removed all citations within the text. This means that not only scientific references, such as (Clarke, 2003) would get killed, but if I said something like, "Coco peat is unreliable, as D'Amato points out in his book", they'd change it to "Coco peat is unreliable."
This isn't too toxic, as I'll just create a detailed citation guide and put this up on my web site to aid the reader.
Meanwhile, my wife Beth is quite happy with it, and points out that they didn't dumb down my occasionally complicated sentence structure.
Anyway, they asked for my corrections, so I sat down and started writing corrections. When I was finished, a couple of days later, I had written a document FORTY-TWO pages long!!!Yikes!!!
That's not to say that the draft they did was bad. It's just that publishing a book is a complicated procedure!
One thing I regret about the book is that, I suppose in accordance with modern aesthetics in publication layout, they put a reasonably large amount of "white space" in the book to make it easier to read. My taste would be to fill such white space with figures or text, but it's all about making the book prettier.
They've done a great job with the images, too. Nearly all the images are mine. However, I've had a couple of line drawing made to illustrate some hard things. Also, I've gotten some really cool images by some of our intrepid CP explorers to round out genera I haven't had field experience with. So the book looks nice.
I'll post more here as things unfold, ok? It's a pretty cool process, involving boredom, excitement, laughs, and tears!
Barry
So, I thought I've give you some updates on what's going on with my book. I'm not doing this as a plug, rather I think that few of us have had the opportunity to write a book on CP, so I thought I'd tell you what the experience has been like.
Here is the current status. The book is INDEED going to be published. About 10 days ago I was shipped the first draft of the completed layout for the book in two massive chunks. The kind folks at the publishing house asked me to return to them the entire set of revisions in about 5 days. Eeesh! After months of sitting around waiting, I had to jump into hyperdrive. This is what the publication process has been like: classic "hurry and wait, hurry and wait."
Well, I looked over the first version and saw they had done a fabulous job with the layout. They did not have any problem with a couple of things I was concerned about, i.e.
1)The use of Latin names.
2)The clear acceptance of evolution in the text (crazy this is even an issue)
3)The acceptance of the occasional sly joke
Interestingly, they removed all citations within the text. This means that not only scientific references, such as (Clarke, 2003) would get killed, but if I said something like, "Coco peat is unreliable, as D'Amato points out in his book", they'd change it to "Coco peat is unreliable."
This isn't too toxic, as I'll just create a detailed citation guide and put this up on my web site to aid the reader.
Meanwhile, my wife Beth is quite happy with it, and points out that they didn't dumb down my occasionally complicated sentence structure.
Anyway, they asked for my corrections, so I sat down and started writing corrections. When I was finished, a couple of days later, I had written a document FORTY-TWO pages long!!!Yikes!!!
That's not to say that the draft they did was bad. It's just that publishing a book is a complicated procedure!
One thing I regret about the book is that, I suppose in accordance with modern aesthetics in publication layout, they put a reasonably large amount of "white space" in the book to make it easier to read. My taste would be to fill such white space with figures or text, but it's all about making the book prettier.
They've done a great job with the images, too. Nearly all the images are mine. However, I've had a couple of line drawing made to illustrate some hard things. Also, I've gotten some really cool images by some of our intrepid CP explorers to round out genera I haven't had field experience with. So the book looks nice.
I'll post more here as things unfold, ok? It's a pretty cool process, involving boredom, excitement, laughs, and tears!
Barry