A New Universe for “Couples at the Crossroads”
Oct 14th, 2011 by admin
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are confronted with something you know absolutely nothing about, and all of a sudden you realize that a whole new universe has opened up in front of you? You are amazed by how much you didn’t even know existed and are mesmerized by the wealth of information that is now available to you.
Well, this is what happened to me when I shifted from writing a book to becoming unwittingly involved with the intricacies of layout and technical editing, ISBN numbers, Library of Congress Cataloguing, fonts, headers, footers and code. It was mind boggling!
This happened when I met with Heinz Kegerer, our layout and technical editing expert, to discuss the preliminaries of getting our book, “Couples at the Crossroads,” published. After the first couple of sentences I realized he was talking over my head. He might as well have been talking to me in Chinese (which I do not speak nor understand) as far as I was concerned. I had taken for granted the process of publishing a book. I assumed someone else was going to take care of it.
When I kept staring at him with a blank look, Heinz realized I was totally clueless. He was asking me to make decisions and I didn’t even know what he was talking about! He backtracked quite quickly, I must say, and started explaining things as simply as ABC. From there, he painstakingly pulled me along by the hand, trying to get me up to speed, so I could comprehend what he was trying to communicate to me.
Not that I know much more about this now, but I certainly have much more appreciation for all the work and expertise that goes on behind the scenes in the self-publishing process.
Here is Heinz with me during one of our meetings in which he is trying to explain some basic concepts.
I will never be able to pick up a book and leaf through its pages without thinking about all the work that went into making this book the final product I now hold in my hands.
