Thoughts on book writing

   Off and on, for the last two years, I have been working on a book for publication on Amazon's CreateSpace print-on-demand publishing venue.  
   In August of 2008 I put a PDF of a working draft for a book entitled "How to Inspect Your Own Home" up on a site called MyeBook. Somewhat to my surprise, over a six-month period,it got over 86,000 views! Wow, I guess there really is an interest in this subject matter. 
   That first effort, much like the several blogs I have here on Blogger.com, Posterous, Wordpress and ActiveRain was just for fun and to help hone my writing skills. It occurred to me that with that much interest, this should be an idea to be reconsidered and expanded upon. I began looking online for publishing options that would be suitable for my needs. As it turned out there are several self-publishing solutions available to a budding author. Of the several I looked at, the program offered by Amazon.com called CreateSpace print on demand seem to be the most workable for me.
   I pulled the book off the free site and began working on it in earnest. Boy! I had absolutely no idea of what I was letting myself in for. Up till this point, I considered myself a somewhat decent writer.  At least I had a decent grasp of the English language, basic grammar and sentence construction.  Where I fell short was in the mechanics of actually crafting a written document longer than a page or two that would be acceptable to the publisher and hopefully to the public. Writing a book is a whole lot different than blogging or writing short articles. There are entire manuals written about the mechanics of doing this type of thing.

Time to go back to "school".

   I soon found that I really needed to become a student of the writing process. Thanks to the resource pages from CreateSpace, Lulu.com and others, I soon amassed a decent collection of writing guides, style sheets, and Word templates as tools to use in this endeavor.  The core material of the book was already there, much of it in my head as a result of many years in the construction trades and as a professional home inspector. Putting all of this information into a readable form was a huge challenge.

   At first, as I usually do, I just sketched out a rough outline of what I wanted to say and began writing. Essentially, I jumped into the middle and tried to do everything all at one time. Writing the content, formatting it on the fly, pagination, chapter numbers, footnotes, and all the other mechanics of actually writing a book.  I quickly discovered that this is NOT how you write a book. At least not how the professionals do it. Back to square one. 

   I have been essentially a "casual user" of Microsoft Word for many years. I've used it to write reports, short articles, personal and business letters and other simple documents since before Word 2000. Prior to that, I had been using Word Perfect. Using these word processing programs in this fashion was akin to using a limousine to run into town for beer. Part of my learning process involved learning how to use Word 2003 properly and use all of its multitude of styles, formatting and version control that were available to make your job a bit easier and to produce professional quality documents.  So now, not only was I learning how to build a house, I was learning how to use the tools to do so at the very same time. Not the most ideal way to go about it.

   What I learned is that if you know how to use the tools available and follow a sequence, it is actually pretty easy to write a book. The proper sequence of operation made a huge difference in the amount of work I had to do. After literally redoing the entire 180+ pages several times, I figured there must be a better way.  There was, and I discovered it by using the resources mentioned above.  I must give credit where credit is due.  One of the most useful resources I found was a publication called "Build Your Book" by Waltron Mendelson.  This wonderful free guide was an invaluable resource that really helped me sort out some of the more arcane details of creating a professional quality book suitable for publication.  It explained some of the publishing jargon that I was running into so that I could actually do what was expected. Terms like "verso" (the left-hand page), "recto" (the right-hand page), "folio" ( the page numbers), "front matter and back matter" ( the printed information in the front and the rear of the book that is not actually "content").  There was also an extensive section on typography which is the selection of the correct font and typeface size as well as line spacing, justification and kerning (the spacing between letters) required to make your book readable.

unformatted text from one of your master files. Bingo! If you did it right, everything looks beautiful. Now go back and insert any graphics that you want to include. After all that is done, you can then work on pagination and section breaks to fine-tune everything. It's all about the sequence.

   Looking back, now that I'm done, I'm glad I took the time to learn this very useful information. Should I decide to write another book, it will go a lot smoother than my first attempt I'm sure.