Well, I wrote another book. After in March 2012 self-publishing a compilation culled from of 3 1/2 years of blog posts and then in October 2012 a compilation of book review blog posts, I've now written and have available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions my new book More Words Written Down taken from blog posts since the prior two books.
Overview
More Words Written Down is a follow-up effort to the compilation book projects Words Written Down and 111 Books Reviewed with all three coming out of this blog and each an appreciation of words put down on a page in a meaningful order.
The blog itself was begun 5 ½ years ago and my approach to it has been to read things of interest and then attempt to describe those pieces well and make connections between them.
The result of this is hopefully both a repository of great writing and body of work with my thoughts on the pieces. As part of this body of work idea, the blog and book compilations out of it are also intended to serve as a tangible record for my two boys of what things I found interesting or important early in their lives.
Links noted throughout the print version of the book can be found at the referenced blog post and have as their criterion for inclusion the concept of Interesting. If writing was deemed interesting, it’s noted along with my ruminations on the topic and view of what makes that particular set of words grouped together into a book or story so good that they acquire permanence.
The goal of Words Written Down is to highlight and pay homage to this permanence of words. Everybody's gotta have a thing, and for me, one of my big things is words. Here's to hoping that as my boys get older they find the things that have importance for them and get to spend their time pursuing and working on those.
Contents
More Words Written Down (like my prior two books) is a cleaned up compilation of blog posts I've done, with those posts separated into the below categories:
Book Reviews
Writing
My Writing About My Writing
Sports
Outdoor Adventure
Family / Parenting
Business
Everything Else
The idea behind putting it into a book (or three books) relates to both the aforementioned permanence of words idea and I've found interesting the process of editing the posts into book form, both a print version and Kindle book that has embedded links to the stories I wrote about.
Assembling the book
The creation of the print version of the book was done via CreateSpace by Amazon and the eBook version via Kindle Direct Publishing by Amazon.
From a process perspective, I first copied over posts from my blog into a Word document and then cleaned each with taking out any html formatting and organizing into the categories above. From that point, the work was around formatting with getting the post spacing and usage of bold consistent as well margins correct for a CreateSpace book (involving left and right as well as book gutter margins). Additionally, headers were inserted, with it seeming to take an excessive amount of time to create in Word new headers for each of the post category sections.
The steps of then uploading a .pdf file on CreateSpace were easy, but then reviewing the submitted file resulted in my time after time having to go back to the Word document to correct something. In many cases these corrections were to line spacing that worked fine in just a Word document, but had to be changed for the purpose of a book so that I wouldn't have for instance the first line of a new post on one book page and then everything else on the next page. The cover creation via CreateSpace was also a fairly simple process, the only thing I really had to figure out was how to create my "Beckam Callum Book Company" publisher logo via first Word and then the Snipping Tool and saving it as a .jpg file.
The creation of the eBook version via Kindle Direct Publishing was fairly easy in comparison, especially since most of the time I spent editing the print version was around headers and new page line spacing, neither of which exists in eBooks. The only real step required was to create an eBook table of contents and that was a simple process to do on the Word document I then uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing.
Having the book(s) completed
I'm not going to make any broad declarative statements about this absolutely being my last blog post book compilation lest I change my mind, but this third one likely was it as while I still expect to continue reading a lot and keeping track of great writing I've come across, I'd like to find new ways to spend my writing time and energies than simply writing about excellent work from others.
That said, the time spent on the blog (and books resulting from the blog) has been enjoyable and resulted in tangible outputs that I think have permanence to them (there's permanence word again) and I'm happy with that.
Showing posts with label 111 Books Reviewed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 111 Books Reviewed. Show all posts
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Monday, October 01, 2012
My New Book - 111 Books Reviewed
Yep, I wrote another book... 111 Books Reviewed.
After I at the end of March finished the project to put 3 ½ years of blog posts into book form, I considered what would come next with my writing.
I felt there was something additional that could be done with past work and came up with a few posts trying to distil out the most interesting things written on the subjects of Writing and Business, but then started thinking about the Book Reviews category from my first book. Work done there struck me as less a compilation of blog ramblings and more actual writing for others. In short, something that could be turn from a pet project into a commercial venture with the offering of a book reviews book. Incorporating reviews that made it into my first book as well as those posted to the blog in the past six months, there was close to 130 reviews that could be worked with. Each was then significantly cleaned up to be less blog post-like (removing both references like “just finished reading” and “link to blog post here” and made sure book title and author at the beginning of review with book name in italics).
Of the reviews done, 111 of them were deemed to be interesting enough (interesting of course an extremely arbitrary assignation) to make it into the book and each book assigned a one, two or three star rating and then put into the category sections below, with reviews in each sorted newest to oldest:
6 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Writing
12 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Personal improvement / Work
10 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Adventure / Danger
18 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Sports
6 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Comedy
11 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Business
7 books reviewed: Nonfiction – History
5 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Parenting / Family
26 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Everything else
10 books reviewed: Fiction
While I was working on the actual content, I had the idea in mind of making the book available cheaply on the Kindle (or Kindle app)… again, that commercial offering thing. The Kindle Direct Publishing site links to a Building Your Book for Kindle PDF guide and from here I found information on using Microsoft Word Headings to build the Table of Contents and specific things around Kindle formatting like how to create a front cover (with the public domain image from the site WPClipart).
After submission of the Kindle book files to Amazon, I then realized the web exclusivity requirement of the KDP Select Amazon program I enrolled in (largely for the purpose of being able to offer the Kindle book for free for five days) meant I had to take down the blog post book reviews the book content based on (was an easy step to select all Book Review tagged blog posts and revert them to draft). After the book content was completed for the Kindle, it wasn’t much additional work to create a paperback version on CreateSpace (as I did for my first book) so went ahead and did that even though the primary intent was to publish this one electronically.
Similar to the first book, the creating of this book was more of an editing of past work project than original writing, but means I’ve now both got another book published and one that’s a more defined offering which can be purchased through Amazon for $.99 (and free for five days every three months). I’m pretty happy with that.
After I at the end of March finished the project to put 3 ½ years of blog posts into book form, I considered what would come next with my writing.
I felt there was something additional that could be done with past work and came up with a few posts trying to distil out the most interesting things written on the subjects of Writing and Business, but then started thinking about the Book Reviews category from my first book. Work done there struck me as less a compilation of blog ramblings and more actual writing for others. In short, something that could be turn from a pet project into a commercial venture with the offering of a book reviews book. Incorporating reviews that made it into my first book as well as those posted to the blog in the past six months, there was close to 130 reviews that could be worked with. Each was then significantly cleaned up to be less blog post-like (removing both references like “just finished reading” and “link to blog post here” and made sure book title and author at the beginning of review with book name in italics).
Of the reviews done, 111 of them were deemed to be interesting enough (interesting of course an extremely arbitrary assignation) to make it into the book and each book assigned a one, two or three star rating and then put into the category sections below, with reviews in each sorted newest to oldest:
6 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Writing
12 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Personal improvement / Work
10 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Adventure / Danger
18 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Sports
6 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Comedy
11 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Business
7 books reviewed: Nonfiction – History
5 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Parenting / Family
26 books reviewed: Nonfiction – Everything else
10 books reviewed: Fiction
While I was working on the actual content, I had the idea in mind of making the book available cheaply on the Kindle (or Kindle app)… again, that commercial offering thing. The Kindle Direct Publishing site links to a Building Your Book for Kindle PDF guide and from here I found information on using Microsoft Word Headings to build the Table of Contents and specific things around Kindle formatting like how to create a front cover (with the public domain image from the site WPClipart).
After submission of the Kindle book files to Amazon, I then realized the web exclusivity requirement of the KDP Select Amazon program I enrolled in (largely for the purpose of being able to offer the Kindle book for free for five days) meant I had to take down the blog post book reviews the book content based on (was an easy step to select all Book Review tagged blog posts and revert them to draft). After the book content was completed for the Kindle, it wasn’t much additional work to create a paperback version on CreateSpace (as I did for my first book) so went ahead and did that even though the primary intent was to publish this one electronically.
Similar to the first book, the creating of this book was more of an editing of past work project than original writing, but means I’ve now both got another book published and one that’s a more defined offering which can be purchased through Amazon for $.99 (and free for five days every three months). I’m pretty happy with that.
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