bookpublishing

In case you’re interested, I’ve changed up my “About” page a bit (there’s a link on the upper right hand corner of my blog page, and can also be found at http://bookpublishing.today.com/about). It will feature books I’ve edited. It won’t feature all the books I’ve worked on, but the ones that I think would be most interesting to my readers and ones that I did a significant amount of work with. Right now it features mostly sports books, but those will be less and less common as I move more into local interest books. But local interest is still a lot of fun–definitely the case with Massachusetts Troublemakers by Paul Della Valle, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

This is a short piece I wrote for to be distributed in my department–it was the featured book at my company for the week of Monday, December 29.

Paul Della Valle, the author of Massachusetts Troublemakers, and I got along right off the bat. My family is from just outside of Boston so I was familiar with many of the sites mentioned in his book. I could tell I was on his good side when I told him I had spent my weekend watching the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots win their respective games. He replied that he was a Sox fan too and had named his dog Yaz after the famous Carl Yastrzemski (I even spelled the name right on the first try this time).

The book process, too, went very smoothly. The only major issue was that some of the photos we thought were okay actually weren’t okay. The replacements would show up fine on my computer, but would not appear the same way on Ann’s [Sr. Pre-Press Associate] machine. How that was resolved, I’m not totally sure, but I think Lori [Prep-Press Team Leader] stepped in and waved a magic wand. Thanks to Ann and Lori for their help on that! Josh [Copyeditor] did some excellent copyediting as well, finding many errors that the author and I had both missed.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this book. I learned that the picture that appears on the bottle of my favorite beer is not actually Samuel Adams—it’s a likeness of Paul Revere (because, apparently, he was more attractive… in a manly, colonial way, I suppose). The author was even nice enough to send me copies of CDs featuring music from the bluegrass band he started. If only every book went this way, with the author acknowledging that I’m a “wicked smaht editah.”

Massachusetts Troublemakers is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, independent bookstores, and wherever books are sold.