My latest book has arrived! After more than two years of work, Visions of the Cosmos is finally a reality. My advance copy arrived a couple of days ago and I’ve been paging through it to see how everything turned out. Mind you, I’d seen the whole thing in layout when the publisher sent me PDF copies for final approval a couple of months ago, but holding the real thing in my hand seems like the culmination of a long birth process. Now, I just hope it sells! It’s starting to trickle into the bookstores here in the U.S., although it’s been on the shelves in the UK for a few weeks now. Amazon has it listed as arriving after Dec. 24, but they constantly update their stock, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up as “available now” any time. And, it appears likely the book will spread worldwide. The publisher (Cambridge University Press) wrote this morning to tell me that there’s a good possibility that it will go into six translations very soon.
So, we started out wanting to write about the cosmos — and we did. But, after that part’s done, the mundane, down-to-earth tasks were left. Those were the work of a cast of dozens of people, starting with Jack and me, to the editors, layout artists, graphics people, printer folk, bindery people, shipping and warehousing personnel, the Post Office, the bookstore buyers and sellers. Now is the fun part for the reader — sitting back and exploring the universe — assimilating the ideas we wrote about in the book.
So, how does a book get published in the digital age? The whole thing was pretty much done digitally. All of the images were sent as TIF or EPS files (a few had to be scanned into TIF format) and the text went as WORD2000 files. Proofs were done digitally as PDFs, except for the final image proofs, which I still insisted be sent to me in hard copy. The strangest things happen when you move from digital back to print — some of which are out of the author’s control and are left to the printer gods to handle. When I got the cromalin proofs (sort of like very fine, heavy-paper photographic prints) one of the images I sent came back with what looked like a screen-door crosshatch pattern on it. I figure it was due to the screening process, but obviously that would have been unacceptable in a print book. So, I drew it to the publisher’s attention and it was fixed in the final version. Multiply that sort of problem by a hundred or a thousand-fold in terms of error-correction, fact-checking, layout correction, and queries about why the typesetter did a page a certain way, and you begin to understand that the act of writing a book doesn’t end when the writer types the final words in the last chapter. Detail, detail, detail. It’s a lesson the writer has to learn, and in reality, I’ve found that I have to be a very proactive partner with the publisher to make sure the book turns out the way I (and my co-author) envisioned it.
Would I do it all again? Sure. This is the sixth time I’ve been through the book publishing process. It’s the most involved I’ve been in production of my own work, although when I worked at Sky Publishing I edited two books and was very involved in those as well. No matter whose work is being published, it’s never routine — each project has its similarities, and each one has had its glitches and obnoxious points. But in the end, all that mattered was that the reader got a quality product.