Book report for last week of August 2025

 The latest lowdown on my book:

As was reported last time, there are three versions of the manuscript to publish: the hardcover, the softcover, and the ebook.  Each one is formatted for their respective media.  The plan as always is to publish all three at the same time.  If the sales are strong I'm going to release a "special edition" of the softcover that includes some photos.  I'm hoping to be able to include this photo in it:

Photo by Ted Richardson

That's Dad with his friend and fellow farmer John Ashe, in a photo taken in February 2012 for a syndicated newspaper story about the state of tobacco farming especially for independent operators.  I got in touch with Richardson a short while later and got his permission to share the photo on my blog (Richardson told me that this was the best photo assignment he had ever done).  I love this photo and want to include it in the enhanced softcover edition.  Going to take some investment in order to pay the licensing fee but it will be worth it.  If there's demand for it, I'm going to make the new edition as good as it can possibly be.

In the meantime, the hardcover edition's text is now 100% stitched together.  The last substantial thing to get added is the acknowledgments, which were a lot of fun to come up with.  There is going to be some figuring out where to add blank pages in order to have it all looking proper once printed, and that's going to be a project for this coming weekend.  But after the hardcover edition is formatted properly, I think the softcover will quickly follow suit.

I've also got to figure out the author bio and brief synopsis of the book.  I've found out that I'm no good at describing myself in a few sentences.  So I'm sort of contracting that task out to friends who know me best.  Maybe they can come up with something.

Finally, will come designing the covers.  Which has to be done after precisely determining the page count.  Coming up with the covers won't be any problem.  I already know what they're going to look like.

What this all means is that at the rate things are going, my book is going to be published by the end of September.  Well ahead of the original intent to have it on sale by the end of the year.  And then it will be out in the wild, for anyone to buy and read.  We'll see what happens then.  But as things stand now, it's going to be in y'all's grubby little paws within the next few weeks.

I hope you guys will enjoy it :-) 

Categories: book, weekly book report, writing