I've been under a rock. There is no excuse for not writing as often as I could be. However, the great news: I have a new book on the way! I was 99% certain this morning I'd be approving the new book. Instead, I decided to flip through a section of the book, I rarely focused on in previous editing attempts and was stopped by a glaring error. So I had to fix that. Since I was in the mood for re-uploading the file, I went and tried a little experiment and fixed something that was literally trivial but the fix made my heart feel better about layout.
So "On the Shoulders of Giants", my latest book for The Company (not to be confused with the general Hollywood euphemism for the CIA or any other Federal agency) is actually a 3 part book series. I had started in June organizing all three books, I actually thought I could publish all three books by the end of the summer. But I realized, there were some major holes in my research for the bulk of two of the books--so I focused on this third book, the biographies of people who contributed to science, 43 different people in the field of science and their accomplishments written for students who need modified curriculum. For every 1-2 pages of biography, there are 2 different sets of questions. One direct W/H questions (Who, What, When, Where, How--no "Why"..that's a different level of thinking), and the other more about encouraging research and finding answers to relate to the readings. Every biography had a map of the modern birth country of the scientist, a timeline of the scientist's life in perspective of the timeline of history that modern history recognizes, and then one illustration that relates to the reading of something that the scientist is connected with.
This book was intended to be a capstone on an already epic series. And then when I moved it to be my sole focus, I do think it lost a little edge, and then I went into the publisher to start setting the book up for publishing. And then there was a problem. A major problem. At 200 pages, with about 175 pages that had color, the book would have to be priced at nearly $50 for The Company to make any reasonable money-- our usual royalty is from $6-$10 per book. That amount broke our general rule of trying not to charge more than $30 to every customer.
We hemmed and hawed painfully for a few days. There are some things that aren't worth fighting for, we put the customers first. The book illustrations were redone: all to be in black and white. It was challenging at first, because we didn't know what would translate well in black and white-- it turns out nothing did so we threw away a lot of original illustrations and used some very old, old graphic tricks like patterning to get the effects we wanted, not just removing the color from the graphics. We tried just removing color from the graphics. It wasn't enough to be visually clear.
So right now, we're waiting to hear back from the publisher. We're 99% certain we'll be approving the draft as final tomorrow. (Yes we know we were 99% certain we'd publish to day, but give us our hope!)
