The Ed Techie

What does an index say about you?

I'm currently compiling the index for my VLE book. I could have had a professional indexer do it, but that would come out of royalties, which are scant enough, so I thought I'd do it myself (there are times when academic publishing veers perilously close to vanity publishing). I figured as I knew the content it wouldn't take me long, right?

Wrong. It is an arduous process, but that aside it reveals four things:

i) Why do I include some terms and not others? One is placed in the position of having to guess what readers will want to find in an index.

ii) Do a search for a term is problematic for a writer as it surfaces the terms you use excessively. The next time I write a sentence with the word 'community' in it, I'll be paralysed because I went through the word count in the book.

iii) It also reveals some interesting things about the content, sort of like a primitive form of data-mining. For instance, does it highlight a basic bias in myself or the book that 'content' had roughly twice the occurrences of 'dialogue'?

iv) It made me yearn for a web 2.0 social index instead of my top down one. Alas I don't think the publishers will let me release it for bookmarking by a community (damn, there I go again).

The tricky issue of book covers

I have been asked by my publisher for some suggestions for images for my VLE book. I really struggle with this because a) I'm not a very visual kind of person and b) the IT/Educational Technology area doesn't really lend itself to photographs very easily.

I wrote a piece for the Times Higher once and they sent a photographer to my house to take a picture to accompany the piece. He was very disappointed when he turned up. 'Do you have a bank of computers?' he asked hopefully. I shook my head, indicating my sole laptop. We tried various poses - me grinning over the top of the screen, me looking pensive as I type, me cuddling up to the keyboard... well you get the idea. Needless to say none of them would have been candidates for the National Portrait Gallery, so in the end they just went with a (rather scary) close-up of my face. Which I think demonstrates the problem, even with a professional, experienced photographer, the best we could come up with was my mug.

Here is the cover of my last book - not bad, but there are only so many keyboard close-ups you can get away with. In the end I sent them a list of key words and concepts in the hope that someone there will be more adept at finding such images. Watch this space for the results.

The Granularity of Ideas

I've finally got around to reading The Wisdom of Crowds. It's enjoyable, and while I know lots of bloggers have retaliated with tales of the dumbness of crowds, but I think that misses the point. We know that crowds can be dumb, and become mobs, but what is interesting is when they become smarter than the smartest individual. Suriowecki claims that conditions need to be right for this to happen.

What had put me off reading it though was that the title, or maybe the introduction, kind of told you all you needed to know. This is true of many popular business books that cross over to a general audience - for example the Tipping Point or The Innovator's Dilemma are both neat ideas that can be pretty much encapsulated in a paragraph, or at least an article. The popular writer is in a dilemma here - in order for their book to be popular it needs to promote one good idea that could be conveyed in the typical Hollywood/elevator pitch. But the currency for such ideas is the book, so the idea has to be stretched over 80,000 words.

It would be nice if the blog post became the granularity for ideas wouldn't it and then we could save all that time reading and writing books which aren't really required. Not sure how you'd get rich in this model though...

The book manuscript leaves home

Today I finally managed to get the manuscript for my VLE book in the post. Well when I say manuscript what I actually mean is:

• 2 printed copies of manuscript
• Author questionnaire
• 2 compact discs containing files
• Folder containing 2 copies of all artwork
• Disc overview sheet
• Manuscript checklist

It has probably taken me as long to do all the post-writing stuff as it did to write the thing in the first place. You appreciate that academic publishing operates on fine margins so a lot of the mundane work is pushed back to the author. I bet Dan Brown doesn't have to do all this extra work.

There is a short Martin Amis story, Career Move, which is set in a parallel universe where poets command huge advances and are media celebrities, and screenplay writers are struggling, unrecognised artists. So 'Offensive from Quasar 13' is struggling to be published in a little known journal, while 'Sonnet' is being fought over by agents. I like to imagine there is a similar alternative world where academic text books are sold in airports and read on holiday, while trashy thrillers are read by a select, niche audience...

It's a strangely anti-climactic feeling getting the book off. I guess it's because you know it isn't the end, so it doesn't have a cathartic quality. There will be corrections and queries to come back, and then the cover to be determined, and then, finally a printed copy in my hand. I suppose that is the point at which you should feel the sense of achievment, but it is so far removed, both temporally and psychologically, from the process of writing that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on what you did. And by that time you're doing something else anyway.