Musings on topics of small or large importance. Especially partial to subjects that include baby boomers, public figures, friends, Corporate America, the Denver Broncos, NASCAR, my previous home towns of New York City and Columbia (Maryland), stupidity (mine and others'), diets and health and who knows what else!

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Turning In the Last Page Proof Is Almost as Good as Sex

I'm giddy! I'm thrilled! I'm so frickin' relieved!

Our book Building for Boomers is AT THE PRINTER! I just sent the last page proof to Smita, our project manager at Glyph International in India. I had my doubts about working with the folks in a foreign country with our time zones upside down from each other, but it's been fine. Fun, in fact, much to my surprise. I've been working with them largely on their time, the time of their workday, which means I've been up until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. so we could ask and answer questions and communicate pretty close to real time. Consequently, Smita and I have developed a wonderful rapport that we probably wouldn't have otherwise.

What a process this has been. So far. It's not over yet. We've gone the mile, all but the last couple of inches, but those last couple of inches make it real.

For those of you who think you want to write a book, let me tell you that it's much more involved, tedious, time-consuming and, in fact, all-consuming than I ever thought it would be. Not just the writing -- that's really the fun part. The reviewing and editing of the text in Word was a little overwhelming. At that point it's still largely in code (production codes) so you can't see what it will really look like. The pictures aren't there; it's just amorphous text. We could add and change at will, and we did! We were grateful for the chance to do that.

Then come the page proofs, the way it will actually look when it's printed. We could only make changes that did not affect the indexing, so we could add a few words here and there and correct the mistakes and typos, which we kept finding endless numbers of, but couldn't significantly change much. We did find a couple of chunks of copy that had been repeated earlier, so when we deleted them, we had to fill in the space with something about the same length to not throw off the indexing. Challenging but doable.

I rewrote the acknowledgements about 10 times. That was the last piece I just sent in a few minutes ago. I kept thinking of people I wanted to include. My co-author Mike (Kephart) had a very long acknowledgement section, so my adding didn't make it lopsided. Being able to thank people is a great joy. And, we hope they buy the book! (snicker)

Both Mike and I reviewed nearly every word of the text in Word and then in page proofs, so we hope we caught nearly all of the mistakes, typos and repeats.

Now we wait for the index. That should be fun. I rely on indexes (indices, to be technically correct) in business books so I hope this one is good. They did an impressive job on the Table of Contents (TOC). We weren't all that consistent in our structure (ROFL! Understatement!) but the TOC makes it look like we were.

I ordered one of my own books on Amazon.com and paid the same as everybody else. I want to see what everybody's getting. I only get a handful of books for free from the publisher, McGraw-Hill, so nobody better be expecting me to give 'em one. Sorry!

Okay, now I'm calmer and my afterglow is giving way to fatigue. But I've earned it. The last page proof is in and I've gotten the okay message from Smita. Yep, it's almost as good as sex. Almost.