No news is good news

Since the last blog, the days have flown. No news is good news, for nothing has happened in these parts except writing, writing, writing, editing, writing, editing, editing. The result is that as of 13.36 local time today, there is a completed book manuscript to add to the website pages finished two weeks or so ago. The MS will be read over the weekend by project co-investigator Sue Wise, mainly for proofreading purposes, as she has already made comments on content. The big experiment is that this book will not be published by a mainstream academic publisher, but using the platform provided by Amazon KDP, a direct publishing platform that will enable publication of a print on demand paperback and also a Kindle version that can be read on a variety of devices including tablets and iPhones as well as the Kindle.

Why published like this and not by an academic publisher? They take too long, and they charge too much. We don’t want to have to wait for a year or 18 months, we want readers to be able to have this now, to be able to read it alongside publication of the website and the WWW dataset. And we want to sell the paperback at the very lowest possible price, and the Kindle version free, rather than create profit to go into publishing bank accounts. So this afternoon I’ve been plugged into the Kindle website and You-Tube, gening up on how to format a manuscript for KDP paperback publishing, how to resize and compress images, how to design a reasonably good book cover and other interesting topics.

Should a Kindle version come first, or should this be the paperback? Is it best to do this as quickly as possible, or re-edit all the webpages first? The answers seem to be, yes to the paperback, yes to the webpages, then onto manuscript preparation next week. All very interesting! Hopefully some of these matters will be settled by the time of the next blog. At the moment, it really is a case of, watch this space.

Last updated: 12 May 2017