My new book compilation - More Words Written Down

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.

Words Written Down Book Process

Now that I've actually finished writing and publishing the thing, it seems high time to note the process I went through with the book.

Writing a book has for quite a while has been of interest, but more in the "gee, wouldn't that be great to some day write a book about, I don't know... something" type of way. In October of last year, though, I came across a blog post from Brandon Sneed titled "Why You Should Write A Book" which got me thinking more of the idea and then what really triggered action on the book was reading in December the James Altucher book I Was Blind But Now I See.

There were a number of things that struck me from Altucher's book and in relation to my actually writing one, I noted his mention of having self-published using CreateSpace from Amazon. Related to this, I found interesting that that book didn't seem to have been closely edited (grammatical errors and odd layouts in places), but this didn't take away from a lot of interesting ideas and content from Altucher. Really, it was kind of inspiring to think of just getting words on the page and not letting a need for perfection stop or prevent the book process from beginning.

I began listing out ideas for the book by mid-January and then was further inspired to write the book after reading two pieces that trumpeted self-publishing. Also linked to in this blog post, they were Chris Dessi comes of age by Jeff Pearlman and Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card from Altucher yet again.

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Back to my own process of book writing... my initial idea had the book as a sort of autobiographical rambling around my writing background that would also include significant work from my blog. As I began working with the blog content (copied over into Word via Paste Special with formatted text) I realized that I was doing more of a book compilation project using writing already done rather than something completely new... and was totally fine with that. While getting further into the cleanup (for grammar, layout and to remove content no longer interesting to me) of 150,000 or so words, I fairly easily decided on the book sections and then part of the editing process was including each relevant post into that given section.

As this editing continued, I assumed/hoped that the CreateSpace process would go fairly smoothly once I was ready to submit early March... and was happy to find that it did. Steps involved taking my Word document, saving it as a PDF file and then uploading it, picking a cover design from the CreateSpace library and then waiting a day or two for CreateSpace to complete the acceptance and (cursory, I'm sure) review process so that I could order a proof. I received the paperback proof copy less than a week later and in reviewing it saw that I had basically the finished product book I wanted, but still a few modifications were needed. This mean going back to the original Word document and changing a few words, moving a few sections and going through what I found to be the cumbersome process of adding to each page a header that varied by section. I eventually was able to get the Word doc as desired and then save as a PDF for resubmission to CreateSpace, but it required quite a bit of looking online and then following steps in an exact fashion to get the section headings and page numbers as I wanted them.

Once the new PDF was submitted to CreateSpace and second proof ordered, I worked on figuring out how to have a PDF download available from the blog. I found mention of both Google Docs and Scribd for the purpose, but it seemed to me the interface just nicer via Scribd... which also included the ability to actually embed the book into a blog post.

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So, all this said... I took 3 1/2 years of blog posts, cleaned them up, cut out the ones of less interest now, organized the posts into sections, added introductory text and wound up with a book. Pretty happy with both the end result and that the process took only around two months. Not too bad.

Words Written Down Book

Yep, I wrote a book.



It can be found via both the Amazon & Scribd links below... with Scribd providing the ability to download a PDF version containing all the links referenced in the book (yea, I know the huge royalties don't come to me if the book simply downloaded).

Amazon Words Written Down page

Scribd Words Written Down page - and Scibd file also at bottom of this post

Intent of writing the book was to take much of the blog content I've written over the past few years, compile and edit it down a touch, group it into the categories noted below and... call it it a book (many more details on my blog post Words Written Down Book Process) and myself an author (with "self-published" in tiny little font).

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Below taken from the book front and back covers as well as content section of introduction...


Back cover / Overview

Words Written Down is a compilation book project that came out of the blog www.wordswrittendown.com and an appreciation of words put down on a page in a meaningful order.

The blog itself was begun some 3 ½ years ago and contains the following top of page description: Blog is all about words because... they matter, they influence, they entertain and when you take 'em and put them down on a page in a meaningful order, they acquire permanence. Contained here are a bunch of written words in the form of book reviews, magazine and web article links & summaries and other stuff I like to write about.

Links noted throughout the book can be found at the referenced blog post and criterion for inclusion of each revolves around 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 be so good that they acquire permanence.

The goal of Words Written Down is to highlight and pay homage to this permanence of words. Why? Cause I like words.


Content areas

- Writing – includes content from others on writing, my ruminations on it and a soliloquy post on the topic of Social Media.

- Work – posts on both links to career related content and my writing around work.

- Sports – lots of extremely entertaining content linked to and written about in this category… love me some great sports writing. Also, it’s a bit of an obvious statement but excellent sports writing is about more than just sports. Pieces referenced came from Sports Illustrated more than any other source.

- Business – includes companies, profiles and lots of other business related content written on and linked to. Some of the specific areas of business covered (and noted in the blog tag cloud) include customer service, social media and cloud computing. Content referenced as interesting came from a variety of sources, with Businessweek and Fast Company fairly heavily represented.

- Everything else – perhaps could have been named better, but really is… everything else (life, current events, history, politics, money, profiles, etc) in terms of non-book content written on and linked to. A fair amount of the content noted came from both writing in and writers for Time or Esquire.

- Book reviews – Not all the books were great, but definitely quite a few excellent ones I’ve read and posted reviews on here.


Scribd book page - can either view book online or download as a PDF file (from both the Scribd site hyperlinked and below)

Words Written Down Book

Permanence of Words

A topic I've thought about quite a bit and have written around, but never quite about, is why I like writing.

Now, this blog is all about writing (note the blog title) and I've gone beyond the book reviews and magazine article links a few times to get at what I'm doing with the blog. Perhaps it's even been a somewhat annual process... with Like To Write Stuff: Why & How Thus Far from August 2008 and Wherefore the Blog... Again December of last year.

So I've certainly thought about what I'm doing with the blog and have established what it's about, but have not (least I don't think) written about why I like writing.

The answer to this is arrived at through a bit of a progression...

Starting off, I'd say that I think everyone should have a thing that's of import to them. When I say that, I'm thinking of that thing being something greater than simply liking a given sports team (as Joel Klein wrote of in this Time Magazine piece (which I posted about here) or being say... good at video games. I'm thinking more along the lines of something with some heft and meaning to it.

Now, this isn't to marginalize the huge significance of being a good parent or friend as someone's thing, but me thinks there's a lot to be said for people having something that serves as a creative outlet. Some people's creative type thing is to paint, some to make movies, some to excel at a particular sport... I simply like the idea of my thing being words.

When I think about words, the feeling I have is that they matter (least the ones that are put together into a meaningful order). They influence, they entertain and when you take 'em and put them down on a page, they acquire permanence. There's a certain gravitas about something that remains behind in written form... whether that be on a printed page or out on the interwebnet superhighway of information. Either way it's stored and delivered, something written down leaves a metaphorical vapor trail.

It may be a crazy good trail in the neighborhood of F. Scott Fitzgerald level prose or it may be less than one of the great books, but either way, words written down have permanence.

This concept of permanence very much relates to what I've tried to do thus far with this blog... to create a record both of good writing I've come across and why I like it (and have that be hopefully in a somewhat entertaining fashion). This record may be something that someone else reads on the blog and finds of note, it may be something that I look back on to remember cool stuff I've read, or it may be something the the chillen see in future years and find interesting that their Pa did.

Now, in terms of more traditional narrative writing (fiction or non-fiction both), would I love to be able to at some point answer the "what do you do?" question by saying "I'm a writer?"

Darn tootin' I would. Even if that doesn't take place, though, I like words. I like what they can do and I like creating a record of myself in relation to words... both ones arranged well by others and my own original ones.

Yep... I like to write (and read... and link to good) stuff.