Publishing. Again.

Today I’m working in a library publishing a book. It’s an unusual book - it’s not one of the White Water Writers books or one of my own: it’s a collection of the best essays I received while teaching at Royal Holloway this year.

One of the criteria often seen in mark schemes is that the writing is ‘of publishable quality’. And if we put that sort of thing in a mark scheme, we should make it happen.

So I asked some students to send me a LaTeX version of their essay and I’m compiling them together. Asking for that many turned out to be a mistake in terms of Amazon’s publishing system:

Two dropped out, but that still leaves ten. Next year I’ll keep a tight control on the numbers…

As of the afternoon I’d sent the students a draft and given them access to a git repo to make any changes they like.

The first draft of the cover looks like this:

I’ve asked a designer friend for some feedback on the cover; there are certainly things I’d like to tidy up for it.

I am, as you would expect, having to do lots of this sort of command:

 perl -pi -e 's/…/\\ldots/g' *.tex
 perl -pi -e 's/£/\\pounds/g' *.tex
 perl -pi -e "s/’/'/g" *.tex

…and as I write this, I realise that I already have a script with many such commands for White Water Writers - I should have used that and I will do next time.

Update - A set of things to do differently next year.

• Tell students how this works before setting the coursework.
• Invite the selected students to the repo immediately on emailing them.
• Send one long email with all the deadlines. No, have one long blog post with all of the deadlines, facts, and FAQs
• Keep proper track of which students are ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘not responded’ and use a mailing list.
• Consider a book launch.
• Consider a foreword by someone with a title.