Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / All blog posts / T minus 19 days
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July 14, 2015 by Tien Chiu

T minus 19 days

The book is due to the publisher in the early morning of August 3 – 19 days from now. I’m pleased to say, though, that I am making excellent progress, and expect to be able to turn in the manuscript and marketing materials on time. (Which is a good thing, considering that one major section of the book is about project planning and meeting deadlines.) In fact, yesterday I declared the manuscript complete! and will now turn my attention to translating the manuscript from a conventional Word document to a custom-formatted document to meet the publisher’s submission requirements. I expect this to be a fairly lengthy process which will take up most of the remaining time.

“Complete,” of course, is a relative term. I’m still missing one or two artists’ bios, photos, etc., a few captions are missing information, and so on – but the book is 99.5% done, and my contract editor assures me that the few outstanding items can be sneaked in after the deadline.

So what’s left? Quite a bit, as it turns out. The biggest item is converting the manuscript into Schiffer’s format, which involves inserting a lot of tags into the text, removing the photos and replacing them with image insertion information, putting the captions in a separate file, etc. (Lots of etc.) I expect that process to take me at least half of the allotted time. The remaining half will be spent working on marketing materials: the author bio, the book blurb, figuring out possible sales outlets, defining the target market, etc. More non-writing tasks that are nonetheless essential to getting the book published.

Of course, this is all coming to a head at  the same time as my digital painting class, where one major assignment is due Tuesday the 21st and the final class project is due Thursday the 30th, just a few days before the book is due. Fortunately, with some self-discipline and good time management, I think I can squeeze both of them in. Of course, if push comes to shove, the book comes first, but I’m really enjoying the class and would like to make a strong finish.

I wish you all could read the manuscript! It’s come out remarkably well, infinitely stronger than the book blog I wrote nearly two years ago. It fuses my two decades of experience in project management with insights from 22 well-known artisans in a broad range of media. I’m very proud of it, and feedback from my beta readers has been very positive. I hope the editors at Schiffer will help me make it even stronger.

Sadly, I just gave my latest printed copy of the manuscript to a beta reader, or I’d include a photo of it. It is now 218 pages, with 50,000 words and about 140 photos, and makes an impressive stack of paper. It’s looking almost like a real book now.

But I need to be careful not to get too proud of it. Otherwise I might wind up like Tigress, who may become a snob if we aren’t careful. She is every bit as friendly, playful, and pettable as always, but she also really enjoys looking down on people.

Tigress contemplating her domain
Tigress contemplating her domain

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Filed Under: All blog posts, writing Tagged With: book

Previous post: TC-2, ready to ship
Next post: Ready for the publisher, two weeks early!

Comments

  1. Nann says

    July 15, 2015 at 2:11 am

    Is it possible to pre-order the book?

    • Tien Chiu says

      July 16, 2015 at 2:56 pm

      Not yet! But believe me, I’ll post a link as soon as you possibly can! 🙂

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