Number Eight [link]

Going Home

She’d been making this trip for eight months. When spring had started she had enjoyed the trip down from Rome: watching trees bud with life, the sprouting wheat, life burgeoning in the pastures. It was a joy to see her sister thriving in the little cottage outside Pompeii.

Now, she was going down to bring Rossana home. The baby was going to a nice couple in Naples, they owned a little pastry shop in the Piazetta Marinelli. They were grateful that their childless state was ended. Emilia hated them. They had the baby and all Rossana had was a casket.

I'm putting together a proposal. What are realistic time frames for the following and what are they called. (For an 80,000 word highly technical, heavily footnoted work) ( I know that all but the last are considered part of the editing process, but are there formal terms I should use?)

1) Fact Checking

2) Reviewing and determining revisions needed.

3) time frame for light, medium and heavy revisions to be completed

4) Copy editing

5) Formatting and graphics (very light to moderate on the graphics) - to end up with an electronic version of the actual book.

Gar, what exactly is the proposal for? Because all of that stuff, and how long it takes, is pretty much determined by the publisher.

Not a publisher. A institute is considering releasing my book as a study, and would obviously have to do these things. OK -so I won't put numbers on them. I'll let them fill in the numbers.

I'm still confused -- even if they release it as a study (in book-like form, I'm assuming), wouldn't they take care of that end of it?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just not sure what you need.

They would take care of that end. But they want estimates for what it would cost them. From their point of view, this is a grant. They are paying out the grant in staff time instead of cash. So they want an estimate of what they would have to put their staff time into.

Oh. Huh.

Do they have the staff in place to do those things, then? Because if they do, they should know what's involved. If they don't ... are people who have never edited what is essentially a book before going to undertake that?

Like I said, not meaning to be argumentative, but it's asking a lot of an unpublished author to guesstimate how long and what kind of revisions would be necessary, what copyediting would entail, etc.

Put it this way, the production process for a novel (which is a hell of lot different, and less rigorous, than any kind of academic or scientific text) can take anywhere from five months (in a rush) to nearly a year in the best case scenario (although that's including time for developing and printing the cover, sales lead time to booksellers, etc.).

The raw process of taking your manuscript and and producing a print-ready version after editing and copyediting, etc., would still probably take at least four months or five months, and that's if revisions are light and you do them quickly.

Note to self: Self-publish on Lulu.

I don't know why they are asking this. Maybe they are asking what stage the work is at. I don't really understand come to think of it. They can't think I have done a final copy edit and formatting on my own manuscript, am handing them a print-ready file.

I do know the publicity cycle on studies is much simpler. There is about a two week flurry of press releases and press conferences, and after that publicity is up to the study author. But then again, sales are not the point. Most people who read it will download the free version. A fraction will order a printed copy.

Zenkitty's joke is actually on point. Given that paper orders are typically in the range of 500 to 2,000, a lot of institutions use LuLu to handle printed orders. Essentially the object of the process is to produce a pdf people can download or order a printout of it. Either the institution will print 500 copies at a local print shop, take or orders and do fulfillment, and print another 500 when that runs out - or they will save that trouble and print on LuLu. A completely Non-scam use for POD. As an example CEPR (Center for Economic Policy Research - Dean Baker's outfit, highly respected), now publishes all their studies via LuLu.

The group I'm approaching is a bit smaller; they produce most of their studies in partnership with other groups. I'm now wondering if maybe they have never done the manuscript to print-ready file thing before. They've been around for 15 years, and were formed by the merger of two groups that had been around for a decade before that.

Seven

Sitting in that chair, next to the framed photo of papa, that was mama’s spot. If she wasn’t in the kitchen, she was sitting in that chair. Smiling.

The months before death came, however, were not kind. Mama was in too much pain to smile and I was scared that I’d forever remember her as she was in her final days. I’m not worried about that now.

I still can’t bring myself to write the date on the back of the photo, though. Everyone knows that I didn’t even purchase the camera until almost a full month after mama’s funeral.