Writing a Book Part III

I normally start these blog posts by mentioning the 4.5 of you who read this thing. It’s clear to me that this number should probably be 2.5 given that no one actually reads it. Still, I wanted to update you on the book which was mentioned in a few previous posts. If you haven’t seen them, I’d suggest that you go back and read “Writing a Book” and “Writing a Book Part II”.

Well, when I left off, it was late spring of 2025 and I had finally sent the publisher all of my files. This included the information about how I wanted the cover to look and the files about each chapter and everything that had been requested of me. I felt pretty good to be done.

I was then sent an email to tell me that I needed to find an “Indexer”. Like you, I was wondering what the heck that meant. If you look at the back of a book, there will be an index of terms. So, if I used the term Wall Street in the book, the index would tell you every page where that term appeared. Apparently, this is a full-time job for people. There are a ton of them who do this work. Look here for a list created by their national association. I just assumed that some software would tell you that. I didn’t have any real experience with this so I went through the list a few times and picked a person who had done at least a bit of work on topics involving economics. Here is her website.

Since these people stay pretty busy at this job, you have to contract with them a few months out. I contacted her and asked her if she’d be interested in doing my book. I sent her the outline and some draft materials and she agreed. From what the publisher had told me, I’d be contacting her again in late August of 2025 to do her thing.

With that task of finding an indexer out of the way, I waited about 3 weeks before I was contacted by the publisher again in early July. They had sent all of my stuff to a professional copyeditor. At least I was prepared for this part. I knew that someone would need to go in there and make sure that my nouns and verbs were in alignment and that I had not messed up too many sentences. One thing that we disagreed on was the use of quotes from other sources. It was my opinion that if I got something off the website of a government agency or some information from a book, it was best to cut the entire section out and quote the source. She disagreed and wanted shorter amounts of quoted text. She wanted me to summarize what the quoted text said.

It made some sense to me. When I see a newspaper article or a book with a long section of quoted text, I’m very likely to skip over it. People just aren’t interested in reading long blocks of text. However, I countered that there is less room for confusion when you simply take the exact words used by others. If I summarize the words of others, I could introduce my bias or I might not get it right. I like to go with “right from the horse’s mouth” and then we don’t have any drama on the back side. In the end, I cut down the quotes a bit but never got rid of them all.

She also asked me to clarify a statement. I’m not sure that was copyediting but since she knew nothing about income inequality or economics, I figured that she was a good test case for the book. If she didn’t understand it, then the average reader probably wouldn’t either. Maybe I was writing at too high of a level and making it plane wouldn’t hurt.

They gave me about 2 weeks to get that response to the copyeditor done, which I thought was unfair. I’ll explain more on that later but these people wanted everything fast from me but were really slow in giving me anything.

After that copyediting stuff, I waited until early August of 2025 before I was sent the cover for the book. To say the least, I was extremely disappointed. My book cover looked like something done by a fifth grader. I told them so and we got into an argument about it. Why? I went to their website to see the designs of other covers created for other authors. Most were fantastic. Mine did and still does look like garbage. Go here to look at some of the covers. Some are dang nice, in my opinion. They made some minor changes but I was stuck with the one I didn’t like.

In mid-August of 2025, I finally got the PDF version of files. It had been typeset and actually looked like a book. It had those funny numbers and words at the front of all books and that ISBN number thing in there. This time I was given 21 days to get the indexing done and go through all of the files looking for errors caused by the typesetter. Sometimes typesetting will make the titles of the chapters shift or something is out of alignment. I don’t see how any of that happens since the entire thing is done electronically. What’s the deal?

While I was checking for errors, the indexer was doing her things. I found a few small things where words were not correct. One time the word should have been “upwardly mobile” and it was “upwardly mobility”. Just some rather small stuff like that. Nothing which caused wholesale changes to entire pages. Then by the middle of September of 2025, I had gotten the index thing back from the indexer and made my changes. I sent it in and was ready to go.

The cool thing was that I was given pages where people could go to pre-order the book. Here is the one from UC Press and here is one from Amazon. So it was out to be pre-ordered but the purchase couldn’t take place until February of 2026. That was outrageous. It’s why I’ll never go with a academic press again. If all of those files are digital, then what’s the hold up? They lied and said it had to do with marketing but they NEVER did any. All of the advertising about this book came from me. I’m the one who went high and low looking for someone willing to read and review the book. I’m the one who called podcasts and radio shows to get booked. If you’re reading this blog then I’ve probably bugged you to buy a copy of the book.

So, clearly there will need to be one more short update on how all of this turned out concerning the book. These guys are a bunch of turkey’s and laid an egg.

Have comments or questions about this post or any other? Contact me at garyhoover2012[at]gmail.com