After three months of (what for me is) extraordinary patience, I e-mailed the text of the pocket guide to the publisher and inquired on the status of the manuscript.
Impact Publications says that the editing is nearly done and the typesetting is about to begin. (I'm just happy that the pocket guide wasn't immediately shot back to be rewritten along with a gazillion manuscript changes. Woo-hoo!) Of course when the galleys are ready for proof it'll be interesting to see if either product resembles anything we wrote. I think I pretty much gave up control of the content when I signed the contract.
I've sent along the pictures & ideas in this thread (and the social group thread) to see what works for the publisher's guidelines. Personally I'm leaning toward the beach scenes (especially the bootprints morphing into footprints) and the beach chair. I'm trying to be inclusive of all services, ranks, & genders (or at least non-specific) so some of the ideas get pretty crowded on execution. A good cover would work on both the 6"x9" paperback and the 4"x5" pocket guide. But now it's at the mercy of the publisher's style requirements and graphics artists.
Impact is putting together a new catalog featuring the book and the pocket guide. They're still working on "mid-2011" with the military-exchange distributor so hopefully the schedule will firm up in another month or two.
I'm going to contact a few of you for jacket blurbs. These will come from the rank & file, not the usual military celebrity VIPs. (I can only imagine a flag officer's reaction to such a request.) We'll figure out how those fit on the cover or the inside pages.
I've asked the publisher to give me 50 galley copies for proofreading. I'll distribute those among the social group members, as well as a few of you who came aboard later in the process but who represent the type of customers we're chasing. The idea is for your eagle eyes to catch the factual & attribution errors before I embarrass myself in first-edition print. I'm not sure how best to distribute the copies, but I'm hoping that Impact will give me a number of "free book" codes that I can pass along to you for ordering off their website. (I certainly don't want to do a bunch of media mailings out of a box in my garage.) I may not get enough copies for the whole group, so if you decide to take a copy then please commit to giving it a good hard scrub for the sake of those who don't get one.
I've already loaded up the blog posts for this week, so I'll put more of this up on the blog next week (see my profile for the link). The latest post attracted a comment from Bill Birnbaum, whose "Adventure Retirement" blog includes a year in South America and a comment that he applied to join the Peace Corps at age 64. One of our other prolific E-R.org member bloggers has also commented on Bill's posts...
Impact Publications says that the editing is nearly done and the typesetting is about to begin. (I'm just happy that the pocket guide wasn't immediately shot back to be rewritten along with a gazillion manuscript changes. Woo-hoo!) Of course when the galleys are ready for proof it'll be interesting to see if either product resembles anything we wrote. I think I pretty much gave up control of the content when I signed the contract.
I've sent along the pictures & ideas in this thread (and the social group thread) to see what works for the publisher's guidelines. Personally I'm leaning toward the beach scenes (especially the bootprints morphing into footprints) and the beach chair. I'm trying to be inclusive of all services, ranks, & genders (or at least non-specific) so some of the ideas get pretty crowded on execution. A good cover would work on both the 6"x9" paperback and the 4"x5" pocket guide. But now it's at the mercy of the publisher's style requirements and graphics artists.
Impact is putting together a new catalog featuring the book and the pocket guide. They're still working on "mid-2011" with the military-exchange distributor so hopefully the schedule will firm up in another month or two.
I'm going to contact a few of you for jacket blurbs. These will come from the rank & file, not the usual military celebrity VIPs. (I can only imagine a flag officer's reaction to such a request.) We'll figure out how those fit on the cover or the inside pages.
I've asked the publisher to give me 50 galley copies for proofreading. I'll distribute those among the social group members, as well as a few of you who came aboard later in the process but who represent the type of customers we're chasing. The idea is for your eagle eyes to catch the factual & attribution errors before I embarrass myself in first-edition print. I'm not sure how best to distribute the copies, but I'm hoping that Impact will give me a number of "free book" codes that I can pass along to you for ordering off their website. (I certainly don't want to do a bunch of media mailings out of a box in my garage.) I may not get enough copies for the whole group, so if you decide to take a copy then please commit to giving it a good hard scrub for the sake of those who don't get one.
I've already loaded up the blog posts for this week, so I'll put more of this up on the blog next week (see my profile for the link). The latest post attracted a comment from Bill Birnbaum, whose "Adventure Retirement" blog includes a year in South America and a comment that he applied to join the Peace Corps at age 64. One of our other prolific E-R.org member bloggers has also commented on Bill's posts...
