Writing a Book Part II

For the 4.5 of you who actually read this blog, you know that there had been an 18-month gap in my posting because I was busy writing a book. In December of 2024, I was finally able to get back to posting on this blog since the rough draft of the book was finished and with the publisher. Thus, I was free again! I mentioned that I would update you on how things turned out as the process continued. Here is an update of what happened.

For reference you should probably re-read my post "Writing a Book" to understand what happened before then. By December of 2024, I had sent the manuscript to the publisher so that they could send it out to external reviewers. I found this reviewing thing to be rather annoying. I was dealing with the University of California Press so given that this was a press run by a university system, they were known as an "academic press" and academic presses always send stuff out for review. It's why we have the term "peer-reviewed" in the first place. Like the university itself, the press is not-for-profit. However, there are also for-profit publishers called "commercial presses." Sure, they'll send your work out for review but mainly the goal there is to see if this thing is going to turn a buck.

For all of December and January of 2025, I didn't hear a thing from the publisher. That was cool. Our new semester had started at Tulane University where I was working so I had plenty to do. In early February of 2025, I get an email from the person handling my book that the reviews were in and that they were mostly positive. I looked them over and agreed that they were mostly positive. They wanted me to do various things or say various things in the book. My job then, was to write a response saying how I would address the comments of the reviewers. One of the things mentioned, I flat-out said that I wouldn't do. That reviewer should have written his/her own book, but I wasn't going to change my book to be what they wanted. One point made was simply wrong. In the 200+ pages of the book, I never used the term "undeserving poor" but did mention that people from any income level might be undeserving, not just the poor. 

So, I wrote my response. I pointed out that I was NOT going to do what this one person suggested. I pointed out that I never used that term about the poor. I did agree that I needed to move a key point up earlier in the book and that another point needed to be repeated in each chapter. There were other things I said I'd do too. My managing editor was a bit worried about my adamant stance that I was not going to do that one thing. Oh well, then we don't continue with the project. But if I'm writing this book, it's going to be my thoughts. She said okay and bundled up the rough draft, the reviewers' comments and my responses so that she could present it all to the editorial board at the publishing house. That big meeting was scheduled for the middle of March 2025. 

Apparently, the meeting with the editorial board must have gone well because the next day, I got a message from her saying that the book project had been approved by the board and that we would move on to production. She said that I should begin to make the changes and corrections that I had outlined in my response. You might be asking why I didn't just begin making the changes once I finished writing the response? My answer is that I wasn't sure, given her hesitancy, whether the board would accept the project and if they didn't, there was no need to change anything as I'd be looking to move to another publisher (probably commercial). I told her that it would take about a month to do all of the changes agreed to. She said that was fine.

However, the very next day, I got an email from the production manager telling me all of the things that I needed to do to get the book into production. I shared that email with about a half dozen friends because it was monstrously long. In fact, if you printed it out, it would have been 7 pages of instructions single-spaced. If that wasn't bad enough, the email said that they wanted all of the stuff they outlined in the email in 10 days. Keep in mind that I had just told the managing editor that I needed 30 days just to make the changes from the response sheet. 

I emailed back the production manager to say that this was impossible. Heck, it would take 2 weeks just to read through this enormous email. The production person said that I could have an extra 10 days. What? I just told you that I needed at least 30 for the revisions alone. I still had my regular job being executive director and teaching classes. I did not run for the next 3+ weeks. All I did was work and then after work, work some more on this book thing.

The production process came down to turning in a bunch of forms and such. One thing that you must do is get permission to use the graphs, charts, pictures, maps, etc. that you have in your book if it came from someone else. That makes sense. You simply can't go using other people's stuff without their permission. Plus, there are copyright laws and all of that involved. What I didn't understand then or now is why the publisher didn't do that nonsense. They are in that business and deal with others asking them for permission to use their stuff all the time. Hunting down who to ask was such a hassle. In fact, I ended up paying $102, out of my own pocket, to get permission to use a figure but then thought about it and decided not to use the thing anyway. Some places like the Pew Research Center have a statement on their website which says that you can use any of their stuff for free as long as you attribute it to them. You don't need permission at all to use stuff from the government. Public stuff is public. I wanted to use this one figure from an organization and they had no problem signing a release but that their lawyer would need to do it and that would take a few weeks. Ugh.

So, while I'm trying to revise the book, I'm also trying to do all of this production crap AND keep doing my day job. The production people also wanted you to give them a ton of information about the cover of the book. Once again, that makes sense. A cool cover will get people interested. They sent me a link to a photo library so that I could pick one for the cover. Talk about generic and ugly! No wonder most books look so alike. I had gone and used ChatGPT to create an image of what I wanted. However, they said that they would not use AI generated images and I should go back to the boring picture library. I told them that I had already been in the picture library and that was why I went to Chat. I wanted something very different. 

They also wanted all of the figures pulled out of the book and listed in this very weird order. I kept doing it and then finding that there was something wrong with the listing and doing it all over again. In addition, messing with the chapter headings, table and figure listings, and other stuff kept changing the book. This meant that if I changed the title of Figure 5 in Chapter 3, then I'd need to go through the entire book and find every time that I referenced that thing and change it too. What a headache. This was really a pain since I was still revising the text given the response I promised. Thus, something that had been mentioned in Chapter 8 is now mentioned in 2 and 4 so I needed to go back and rewrite that too.

They gave me a "final inventory form" where it listed everything that they wanted. I happened to look through it and saw that they wanted a preface and acknowledgement section for the book. Once again, this is pretty standard, but it was NEVER mentioned! Had I not looked at this form, I would have missed it. I then needed to go create this thing, grammar check it, revise it and everything else while working on the book and the list. In the end, I needed to create about 105 different files and keep track of them all. 

One thing that really annoyed me was when I sent them all of the figures used in the book. From the instructions email look at this "Please do not submit art piece by piece. The preferred method of submission of art files is via google drive link or zip folder with a completed Art Inventory Log." As you can see, they want the files sent with a link to a Google drive, which I do. Since this blog is written on a Google platform, it isn't too hard for me to create links. However, after doing all of that work and sending it to the production people, I get this email in response "If it's possible to send figures as email attachments, that's easier on our end. If not, it's fine for us to download them from the site as you sent them now.  " I swear these people made me want to slap them.

My deadline for everything was Friday April 25, 2025. This included the book too. I was busy trying to find typos and grammar errors. I was also busy trying to fix errors introduced by all of the changes. Plus, there were things that I simply wanted to say differently given that between the initial writing of a chapter and the deadline, President Trump had come into office and dang near destroyed the US economy in 3 months. 

Friday the 25th arrives and I load all of these files up in an email. I keep checking to make sure the order is correct and I haven't missed anything. I'm fairly confident that I did this right given how I barely slept and didn't exercise over the period. So what happens when I hit send? I get an out-of-office email reply. I did all of that work and they wouldn't see it until the next Monday anyway. Someone is getting slapped!

It is clear that I will need to create at least one final post on this book saga to tell how all of this turned out.

Have a comment or question about this post or any other? Email me at garyhoover2012 [at] gmail.com.