Building a Book!

Cute little sand angel diversion.....so little, this kid was.

I never gave much thought to the mechanics of "building" a book until I became an author. Never will I take for granted the hours of work by lots of people to create the book I reach for on a store or library shelf.

Photographs have to be viewed, sorted, discarded, sorted again, and eventually converted to TIF files with captions and [ ] and .tif and "quotes" in a very particular way before bundling them all up and sending to University of Alaska Press. The guidelines sheet sent to me by Acquisitions Editor is full of scratchy notes and little doodles I made during phone calls. I'm still trying to figure out what some terms mean, and have to break down some sections, word by word.

Maps need to be made, a huge undertaking, and the past few weeks were full of desperate emails and frantic telephone conversations with all sorts of entities before I finally wizened up and emailed my web guy who said, "Sure I can."

Once all boxes on the checklist have been crossed out, everything is shipped up to Fairbanks, where a team of freelancers works in collaboration with the production editor who ultimately becomes my touchstone concering all things draft and galley proof, and eventually, final copy of Alaska On the Go: Exploring the 49th state with children.

I haven't even touched the text itself, yet. That's the easy part.

Who would have thought that 95,000 words would be considered "easy"?


Countdown to deadline: 29 days