Meet my book's publicist - Jeff Rutherford

Jeff Rutherford

Today the publicist my publisher uses to promote their books contacted me - meet Jeff Rutherford of Jeff Rutherford Media Relations. He's also involved with a company Appetite PR that promotes apps for mobile devices. That's a great company name, and thinking about it, given the thousands of apps being launched almost daily, getting yours noticed must be a challenge - a bit like books really. I'm looking forward to working with him.

Finished!

It's finished! I've just finished the book, I'm uploading it to Apple's MobileMe cloud drive so my publisher can download a 114MB compressed archive containing: a preface, table of contents, 14 chapters, further reading, two appendices, all the images in the highest resolution possible (with their copyright status) and some ideas for the book cover. To be honest I don't want to let it go. I know I could improve it and there'll still be a few errors in it.
    Now it's over to the team at Springer.

T minus 5

T minus 5 and counting. The manuscript is being delivered to the publisher on Friday so I'm into the final week and the final revisions. I've been sourcing copyright free pictures for the book and once again Wikipedia has been a godsend. Nearly all of their images are under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain and the copyright is very clearly explained for each image. That is so useful as it means my publisher can be certain they're not infringing anyone's copyright. Sourcing dozens of images legally would have been a nightmare before Wikipedia.
    Probably the most amusing is one of a young Bill Gates; he's posing for a police mugshot taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico police in 1977 after a traffic violation. Gates looks like he's really enjoying himself in the photo. Perhaps he's thinking, "my father's a wealthy lawyer." Check it out on Wikipedia.

The writing process

I'm into almost the last week of writing The Universal Machine and I've been asked about my writing process. So here, in general terms, is how I have approached the writing.
    For each chapter I've thought about a general idea of what I want to include and eventually I sketch this down as a rough outline or plan. During this time I'll be reading books about the subject material and using online reference sources. If it's a book I'll use those Post-It tabs to mark pages with useful content on. If its on online resource I use Evernote to clip parts of it. Then once the reading is finished I'll start writing using the marked parts of the books and Evernote as my reference sources. Wikipedia is used to check facts and add details. It's great for facts but very poor for adding colour which has to come from biographies or first-hand recollections. Once a chapter is written I'll put it to bed and move on to something else. Then, I'll return and read/edit the chapter several times. Once I'm reasonably happy with the chapter it is emailed to a good friend who is a professional writer. He reads and picks up mistakes and makes suggestions for improvements. Each chapter is also sent out to one or more academics/specialists with an interest in computer history or specific subject areas to check the factual content and identify potential omissions.
    All of the returned chapters are edited to take into account the feedback and the chapters are then reread and edited over and over. I estimate that most chapters have been reread and edited at least a dozen times. I've been working on this over a year now and  I'll be sad when I finally package it up and send it to my publisher. I've had a great time writing this.

The book is a physical reality

The Universal Machine

On Sunday April 4 2010 I started this blog; the first post was "Welcome." which said:
"Welcome to the blog of the writing of the Universal Tool
I've been writing a book, on and off, for several years now. The book is intended to be a popular science book about the history of computers. I'm a computer scientist by profession and so I've long had an interest in this subject.
   The idea of this blog is to encourage me to keep working on the book by being able to share both the process of writing it and elements from it with who ever decides to follow the blog of just drop by."
    Yesterday I printed out the entire book for the first time. It's a strange feeling seeing the book's manuscript sitting there on the table. Strange but good. Incidentally the blog has been very useful in writing the book.