Math Book Update II

Today turned out to be a fairly significant day in the life of my upcoming book, No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help). I'm still awaiting feedback from some of the early reviewers (due by Sunday, if you happen to be reading this!), but I decided to do a trial run of the publishing cycle at Lulu. I know from past experiences (AgileMan books, anyone?) that this part of the process can often be time-consuming and reveal some obstacles that have to be overcome along the way. So I thought it might be prudent to start in on it nice and early this time around.

Sure enough, I discovered that the page layout that I was using for the Word document was not consistent with the printing format that I want for the book. I thought I'd lined things up in that regard before I started, but apparently... not so much. So a good chunk of the afternoon was spent switching over to the new parameters, which significantly changed my page count (adding about 40 pages to the book) and involved some non-trivial re-formatting along the way. That was all necessary work, though, and I'm glad I tackled it sooner rather than later.

I also wanted to get my front cover sorted out, which chewed up another part of my day. I've now got that all squared away, though, and I think it's going to look very nice indeed. There's still the back cover blurb to take care of, but that's usually the easiest part of the process, as it just requires me to write the text and make sure that it fits into and fills up the allotted area.

In a bid to really get ahead of the curve, I also researched how to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for this latest work of mine. Since I have some vague notion that I might be able to get copies of it into actual brick and mortar book stores, having an ISBN for No Kid is a must. From what I've learned so far, we Canadian authors (hey, stop laughing) can get free ISBNs via the Canadian ISBN Service System (CISS, or "kiss" as they pronounce it). I've submitted my application for that online, and now we'll see how that goes.

As I said to Vicki this afternoon, there seem to be about a million little details involved with writing and publishing your own book. At times, the minutiae can start to get me down, but in general it's quite a thrilling experience, every time. I love working on projects where - for the most part anyway - everything is dependent upon me, and only me. Too many years of dealing with other people who over-committed, under-delivered or just generally didn't know how to get things done, I suppose. It's nice to have all that behind me.