The Book Continues

Ambrose has worked his way through my draft, and I now have some things to go back and touch up. Most of his notes are about rewriting for clarity, so it won't be super easy but shouldn't take me too much time.

I've picked the photos that I want to include, and I'm going to get started on captioning and prepping those. The photos are both easy and difficult. They're relatively easy to pick, but each one takes time to prepare from a normal photo to a captioned plate ready to insert into the book template.

I am not on track with my writing goal for the year, but I think for next year I'm going to do a publishing goal instead. I've been thinking for a while now about having normal print editions of my books along with the large print editions. But I've never gotten around to doing it because it would be a lot of work not only to redesign the interior layouts with the smaller font, but also to redo the covers for the existing large print editions so that they are clearly labeled large print on the cover.

And on that tack, I'll go ahead and make this book simultaneously in large print, normal print and ebook versions. It will be good practice for the other conversions. I think I'll still do the layout for the large print first, and then work out how I want to convert to normal print so I can reuse that system on the other conversions. I have one other hiking book in normal print right now, but I'll need to update the cover of the large print edition with whatever sticker mark I decide to use.

I feel like I'm running a bit late with this book; it won't likely be out in time for Christmas gifts. Well, my family is still getting those, they'll just be late Christmas gifts. On the other hand, I kind of do this every year. The work gets put off until it's cold and snowy outside pretty much every year. And this wouldn't be the first year that I was working long hours on the book over winter break when I have some time off of work.

Overall, I think it's a good one. I learned a lot on this hike, and I hope that I've been able to convey at least some small part of what I learned and experienced. I had some incredible highs on the trip and also some profound lows. I was initially disappointed with myself for not completing the planned 150 miles, but revisiting it has me convinced that it was not a failure, but an adventure.