Book finished!
I finished my book! I had notes, snippets and a long proposal, but basically wrote the thing, 80,000+ words, from just after Christmas until yesterday. I'm beat! I dread, though, having to go through and fix up the footnotes, which are legion.
I got into a little trouble with the publisher though--they made me take down the 9 chapters I had up at my site. So there's now a message there saying that the book is in progress. However I'll check with the publisher to see if it's ok for me to send around chapters for comment. If so I'll email stuff on request. I have it in the form of separate MSWord files for the Introduction and 11 chapters that follow.
The plan was to publish the book in January 2008. But I beat the publisher's May 1 deadline by 2 1/2 months so maybe they'll get it out sooner. Dunno. I've never written a book before. I'm just really, really happy!!!
4 comments:
Thats a shame you had to take the chapters down, though understandable. I guess I will have to wait for the published version to finish reading it. Best of luck.
Congrats! Though from what I've heard, making books freely available online most likely boosts their hardcopy sales. (Cf. Lessig, Benkler, Cory Doctorow, etc.) A pity your publisher hasn't picked up on that.
I believe that. What person in my publisher's publicity dept claimed was that it looked from the site as if the book was in its final form, which was misleading. So maybe when it's finished and published I get to put up at least some of it. She also thought it was too early for publicity.
I read lots of stuff online. For my work I prefer it because I can search, paste quotes, and don't have to have 60 books on my desk. But I still buy books. There are libraries, but people still buy books and I suspect they wouldn't buy many more books if there were no libraries--they'd just read fewer books.
I'm, of course, fanticizing about getting rich and famous--but I don't really expect to make money off of this book or seriously care. I'm an academic: writing books and articles is part of my job, part of what my salary is supposed to be paying me for.
Just back from a conference myself and beat. If you get your bogus email up I can send two of my more entertaining chapters an the introduction, which includes the scheme of the whole book, so that you can see where they fit in. I'd be most grateful for comments.
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