Recently our church secretary, Laura, posted a picture of herself signing a contract for a book that she is writing. In talking to her earlier this week, she said that the book is due to the publisher in August – just a few months away. Her book, a work of fiction, is one of a group of books each being written by a different individual that will be part of a series. I always enjoy interacting with people who have God-given talents that are different than my own. I’ve said about some who are artistic that they have more art ability in their little finger than I have in my whole body. And I could say the same thing about some who are experts in small engines, in plumbing, in nursing, and many other skills/professions.
Now, I have several books with my name on/in them on
Amazon.com, but what makes Laura’s talent different than my own? I thought I’d
explore what the talents are that I have by looking at what my role has been in
the production of these books. While I have blogged about these books in the
past (see here
and here),
it was primarily just a list of the books and not what was involved. Here is the
most recent list of these books. But now I want to dwell on the process and not
the contents.
1.
3/2009 – College Daze
2.
3/2009 – My Father’s Love
3.
5/2009 – Special Poems for Special People
4.
9/2009 – The Replacement
5.
6/2010 – My Legacy
6.
7/2010 – Sir Marrok
7.
8/2010 – Thoughts to Ponder
8.
11/2010 – The Complete Sir Marrok
9.
7/2011 – Passing it On: Lessons Learned in Life
10.
5/2013 – Calvinism in Light of the General Tenor
of the Scripture
11.
4/2014 – My Life
12.
3/2015 – He Gave Me a Song
13.
11/2015 – Journeys with God (see story here)
14.
9/2017 – Then and Now
15.
10/2017 – Introdukshon di Bukinan di Testament
Bieu (Old Testament overview)
16.
12/2017 – Excellent Marriage
17.
5/2018 – And He Wiped Away the Tears
18.
2/2022 – A Great Depression Baby
There are books of poetry (#1, #2, #3, #5, #17),
autobiographies (#9, #11, #12, #14, #18), devotionals (#7, #13), fiction (#6,
#8), Christian theology (#10, #15, #16), and true-life stories (#4).
Publishing
One of the skills that I learned early on was the process of
working through the self-publishing procedure. Initially this was through an
Amazon subsidiary called CreateSpace, but more recently that product has been
absorbed into KindleDirect. Using my computer skills to register a book,
getting it into the format necessary for these products to accept, formatting
an appropriate cover, etc. These are things that most people find daunting and
I have mastered so I can relieve them of having to learn all that is involved. I
have done this for all the books in the list above.
Formatting
Some people are sufficiently skilled that they can create a
formatted and properly edited document (generally using the power of MS-Word).
For others, while they can produce the basic content, things like putting the
document in proper page size (6”x9” instead of 8.5”x11”) with an appropriate (and
consistent) font, adding page numbers, putting in chapter breaks and having
MS-Word produce the table of contents, etc. are beyond their word processing
skills. Often this also includes using my well-developed grammatical skills to
find the misspelled words, the missing commas, and other inconsistencies. I
have used these skills in most of the above books – with the exception of #9-13,
#15-17 as using MS-Word as a tool is getting more common.
Typing and/or Data Conversion
Sometimes the “raw material” for the book is not even
available as an MS-Word document. All the early books of poetry (#1-3, #5) were
only available as type-written or even hand-written pages from prior decades
which I had to type into a document. In the case of #6, the original book was
from 1905 and was only available as a scanned PDF (in poor condition) so while
I could use a pdf-to-MS-Word program to make the initial pass, there was a lot
of manual checking and manual updates needed as well. Finally, in another case
(#7), the devotionals had been written over a series of years and were done
using a number of different word processors depending on what the author had
available at the time. So, I had to convert each of the 366 devotionals to a
common format.
Providing Content
For most of these books, the content was provided by someone
else. But there were some where I contributed content. Obviously, the books
that I wrote (a book of poetry #1, and my autobiography #11) were in this
category. But in the case of #4, the basic material was a series of monographs.
I had to put them in chronological order, and eliminate the duplicate stories
that were sometimes in more than one monograph. But there was a transitional
chapter needed between the end of the war stories and later stories about
individuals that Bob had met after the war. So, I wrote the necessary short
chapter to provide that transition.
In addition, for #8, the original author of #6 had ended one
chapter with a brief outline of a couple of events that he said he would not
cover, then he picked up the story a few days later in the life of the main
character. So, I challenged myself and wrote the “missing” chapters, writing in
the same style as the original author and making the story fit both the
timeline as well as the general outline of the alluded-to stories. This was the
only real fiction that I wrote in all the above books.
Other Technical Challenges
There were a few unique situations that I had to deal with.
#15 is a commentary on the Old Testament, but it is written
in Papiamentu, the Spanish Creole language of the islands of Aruba, Bonaire,
and Curacao that also contains admixtures of Portuguese and Dutch. Thus, the
entire book is in a language that I do not speak or even read (in fact there
are only 340,000 native speakers of this language). So, I could not do my
normal editing and had to just ignore the fact that MS-Word flagged nearly
every word as being misspelled. Seeing pages and pages of words underlined in
red was a unique experience! This is also the only book I published in 8.5x11
format.
Finally, while it’s not one of the above books, I recall my
first exercise in preparing a book. In 1984-85, back long before Microsoft
Windows or MS-Word, I had the opportunity to help a missionary friend prepare
his doctoral dissertation for a PhD in Missiology. Not only did I use many of
the above skills of formatting, editing, etc., but there were technical
challenges such as designing character sets for Hebrew and Greek (which did not
yet exist), and operating in the environment of diskettes (hard drives were not
yet available on the early IBM-PC), near-letter-quality (NLQ) printers (laser
printers did not yet exist either), and the printing of a 600+ page (single-spaced)
document. His dissertation became the basis for several books he later wrote. (I’ve
given a lot of details here
if you are interested.)
Best Experiences
Bob Kauffman (book #4) was very invested in his stories and
had memorized most of them. But having a published book propelled him to a new
level of acceptance. In the years after the release of his book (it was
published in 2009 and he died in 2013), he gave speeches to various local civic
organizations, in schools, etc. He was invited to be one of the featured
speakers at the annual Remembrance Day at Gettysburg National Park. And he recited
one of the stories at the Normandy Cemetery in France. This latter one was
recorded in 2012 and can be viewed on YouTube here – I encourage you
to watch it, he is reciting from memory the last chapter of his book.
The other one that I get emotional about was related to the
book of poems written by my mother-in-law (book #3). In her final year or so of
life, we had her moved into a nursing home and my wife spent several months
living in Michigan to help coordinate her care. We were also working on
cleaning out her house and one of the things I came across was a large box of
all the poems that she had written. There was no organization to them, most of
them were written on scraps of paper and often with carbon sheets so she could
have several copies. We made the decision to organize them and publish them for
all her family members to enjoy. It took a few months and a lot of work, but I
did so, then brought several copies with me on one of the many trips to
Michigan I made during that year. She was by then an older person, living in a
nursing home, and being very hard of hearing had little interaction with
the staff. But when we made a presentation of several copies of her book, she
became an instant celebrity. Instead of being an old, mostly ignored, lady, she
was now a published author. They paid to have her hair done in the local solon
and got her picture taken for the nursing home newsletter. For the remaining
months of her life, when you entered the nursing home, a copy of her book was
prominently displayed on a table right inside the front door as you entered the
lobby. From ignored to important – just because she had written a book! It was
a pleasure being able to give her that experience.
Conclusion
I am not, and never will be, a famous author. But through my
efforts, I’ve had the opportunity to help many others (mostly my age and older)
to see a dream be realized and to have what for many is their life’s work be
turned into a physical book with their name on the cover. They can then “go out
in style”, knowing that at least some of their life experiences will not be
forgotten and can be passed on to future generations. Seeing the smiles on
their faces makes my effort all worthwhile.
I conclude here with a copy of the covers of the books I
have helped to publish. Each one is unique and each one worthwhile reading.
