Behind the Scenes Chapter 13 – Publication

This is part of an ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook. 

With the book sent off to the printers, Tom and I wait, hoping everything will come out ok in the finished copy. At the beginning of February (2019), we receive an advanced copy from the publishers. In my hands, I finally hold a finished copy of the book, all 500 grams of full-color material awaiting my appraisal. I open the book, taking in the fumes of the printing ink while enjoying the sound of freshly pressed paper being released from its static grip. The weight of 3 years of hard work slips off my shoulders and I can finally smile and enjoy the fruit of our labor.

We have a month until the official release date in mid-March, but I pore over every page, examining and double checking for any errors/omissions. With a highlighter, I mark small issues to revise for the second printing of the book, which will occur after current inventory stock dwindles. This may take anywhere from a year to a decade depending on demand. *(update: second printing was completed in Jan 2020, much earlier than anticipated)

There are a couple of things to change for the second printing, but overall the book is free of major issues and inconsistencies. Phew. I think with any publication comes room for improvement, and with every read there’s always something to re-write, re-think, and re-work. It’s similar to a musician, who, at every live show, tweaks their hit single, adding a guitar part or a slight twist of the tempo in order to add to their work. I’m sure there will be some slight modifications during the second printing of the book, but overall Tom and I are quite happy with the way it turned out. If you told me a decade ago I’d be holding my own copy of a guidebook with my name on it, I would have told you to stop dreaming. But indeed, such dreams have become a reality, and we can hope that our new book continues to be a source of useful information and inspiration for years to come.

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 12 – Layout

This is part of an ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing a hiking guidebook. 

Now that all of the major issues are now taken care of, the book is passed off to the designers for layout. This is the first (and only chance) we have to see the final book copy before it is sent off to print. While it is truly exciting to finally see how the book will actually look, it is quite stressful to be send a 400-page pdf file with a tight deadline to check each and every page for errors.

We are given just 10 days to read through the entire book and check for typos and other design issues. It is a sleepless week of fine-tooth combing. The next time we will see the book is after the book comes off the printing press. In an ideal world, we would be given two “drafts” or final checks, with about a week in between so the designers can pick up our changes. As it stands, we can only cross our fingers that our final notes and suggestions are picked up before the book goes to print.

 

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 11 – Galley Proofs

This is part of an ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook. 

After the copy-editing is finished with Georgia, the book goes back to Cicerone and on to the galley proof stage. This is the first chance we have to see how the book will look with the photos and maps added. It’s basically set up as an A4-sized document, and again we are asked to mark up the pdf document using Acrobat Reader DC. The 300-page document takes a while for Tom and I to carefully examine, and we take turns marking it up since we need to submit just one document, so we use a shared folder in Dropbox to accomplish our tasks.

Editing is done through Acrobat Reader markups

It’s about a month between the two stages, so we have a chance to take a break and forget about the book while looking at the galley proofs with ‘fresh eyes’.  All in all there are about 100 issues that need to be dealt with before the book can go to layout, but the attention to detail is worth it in order to make a better finished product.

 

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 10 – Copy-editing

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

One the appraisal and the overall issues of the guidebook were complete, our manuscript was sent to the copy-editor for a thorough check. A copy editor’s job is to prepare a manuscript for layout, but the task involves much more than just arranging a few words on a page, for the copy editor can ensure that the book flows from start-to-finish, and offers a “fresh set of eyes” to point out things that may need further elucidation.

Cicerone usually subcontracts this important task out to freelance copy editors, and our book ended up in the hands of Georgia at Laval Editing, who had previously worked on a number of other Cicerone guides. We were in good hands.

The process involved Georgia going through our manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, compiling all of her inquiries into a word file that Tom and I needed to work through, one issue at a time. It involved a lot of back-and-forth over a period of 6 weeks or so, where we turned a strong manuscript into a tight, concise fortress of a guidebook. It’s something that self-published authors don’t have at their disposal, so if you’re considering publishing your own book, hiring a copy-editor and proofreader will be an invaluable asset.

Most of our work involved highlighting and commenting on issues that Georgia brought up about each hike, a simple task made easier by utilizing the ‘track changes’ function. Some of the issues were quite simple to address, while others involved a slight rewriting of sections to make them easier to comprehend. By living here in Japan, I often times fail to elaborate upon things that first-time visitors may have trouble understanding, so providing a bit of “cultural context” hopefully ensured that our readers would avoid some common pitfalls. For instance, when we recommend that people avoid hiking during Obon, then Japan residents automatically know that it refers to the holiday in mid-August, while those coming to Japan for the first time will likely have never heard of this mid-summer ritual.

It was a pleasure working with Laval Editing, and if anyone out there is looking for someone to look over their manuscript and get some valuable feedback, I can think of no better place to seek such wisdom.

 

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A Bigger Audience

I’ve been making an effort to post more on this blog, but sometimes paid writing assignments take precedence, especially when it comes to promoting the guidebook.

Please enjoy my latest article on Kita-dake for Cicerone, a bit of a hybrid between the prose of Tozan Tales and the practicality of Hiking in Japan.

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 9 – The Appraisal

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

 

As Tom dropped the manuscript off at the Post office, we took some time to relax and forget about the book for a while. Even though our word count was too high, we knew that if Cicerone approved of the contents then there would be a way to make it work.

It took about 6 weeks for them to get back to us. Despite their initial budget to release our guide as a 288-page work, we were given the green light to expand it to 400 pages, knowing that it would both increase the cost of production and the final resale price. Tom and I were both happy with that, as anything less than a near-complete guide to the Japan Alps would be a letdown. Sure, there were some routes that needed condensing, but at least we had the space to write about almost all of the options available to avid hikers and trekkers when they hit Japan’s alpine wonderland.

The first step in the production process was an overall read through the manuscript to deal with some ‘big picture’ issues, the first of which dealt with the elevation gain and loss figures for all of our hikes/treks. All of this information needed to be included in a handy chart in Appendix A. I have never been a big fan of arithmetic, so the fact that some of our elevation gains/losses figures weren’t adding up was hardly a surprise. Luckily these were all red-flagged and corrected with a little help from the calculator.

In addition, we needed to lose a couple of treks in the book in order to come in under the page count. Fortunately, we found a great work-around that by consolidating the Daikeretto info into the Yari-ga-take hike. Originally we had planned to have the Yari-Daikiretto-Okuhotaka traverse as its own separate trek, but were able to just add a side box with a more condensed description. Likewise, the Shirane Sanzan traverse in the Minami Alps was included within the Kita-dake hike description instead of its own stand-alone trek.

With those major issues solved, it was time to move into the copy-editing phase and the ‘micro’ issues within the actual hiking descriptions.

 

 

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 8 – The Manuscript

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

With the table of contents set, Tom and I create a 2-year schedule for finishing the manuscript. Before we could even begin to write, we needed to actually do all the ‘hands-on’ research, which involved hiking all of the routes in the book. Tom set off first and walked the Chō – Jōnen loop in the Kita Alps. As usual, he had glorious weather and even saw an Asiatic black bear (but unfortunately could not capture any photos of the elusive creature). Our best chance of getting a bear photo, we fear, will be in the local zoo.

Tom used another Cicerone guidebook to take a stab at writing up that trek for the book. He enlisted my help in writing an ‘alternative approach’ via Ichinosawa to the summit of Jōnen. It had been quite a while since I hiked that route, but I used my photos to help jog my memory and we submitted the hike to Cicerone for feedback. The comments from the editorial team were most assuring, and with that stamp of approval we could begin the writing process in earnest.

My first stab at a hike description involved Mt Senjō in the Minami Alps. I set off after the rainy season finished and managed to have somewhat acceptable weather, meaning that I didn’t get rained on and captured a few photos worthy of publication. I forwarded my write-up to Tom, who then passed it along the Cicerone for feedback.

Thus began our slow, methodical construction of the guidebook, which relied on the foundations set by our first two write-ups. We continued this process hike by hike, so by the time we completed the manuscript, the publisher had already seen it all piece by piece. After the first summer, Tom and I were actually relieved that we had another year-and-a-half to finish writing it, because it turned out to be quite a lot of work.

As we moved into the spring of 2018, I took a short trip back to the States but spent most of my time locked in a room trying to finish writing up the Minami Alps traverse. Upon returning to Japan, Tom and I looked at the submission guideline checklist in more detail. Our manuscript was nearly complete, but we still needed to compile the photos and caption list.

Cicerone were incredibly supportive during the entire process, and assured us that the April 30th deadline was for a digital copy of the completed manuscript. Photos and a printed copy of the manuscript could come a few days later if needed.

We made the deadline and sent off the package. We were relieved to get everything completed, but were a bit concerned whether our submission would be accepted or not. Instead of the agreed-upon 60,000 document, we handed-in a 90,000 word monster.

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 7 – Photographs

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

To be honest, this was the part of the guidebook I was most concerned about, but not because of my camera skills. On the contrary, the biggest worry involved the weather, for as every devoted reader of this blog knows, I don’t have the best track record when it comes to clear weather. In Japanese, there is the term 雨男 (ame-otoko, or ‘rain man’). I’m pretty sure if you looked up 雨男 in your dictionary, you’ll find a picture of me standing in the pissing rain on top of a cloud-covered mountain.

So what to do? I would simply have to become a very picky mountaineer and only head to the Alps when the weather was certain to be fine, which meant keeping a very close eye on the weather forecasts and trying to find a clear-weather window. Alpine weather is notoriously fickle, but on days of high pressure there is usually a small window of 2 or 3 hours after sunrise that dawns clear before the clouds in the valley escape from the heat and head to higher elevations.

My batting percentage was nearly flawless. While I did get rained on quite a lot, I managed to make it to the safety of the mountain huts just before the skies opened with fury (except for a soggy stretch on the descent from Shiomi-dake).

We were asked to submit 200 photos from the guidebook, for around 100 would be selected for the final book. Choosing among thousands of photos was an arduous task, and in the end we submitted close to 250, for which around 140 made the final edition of the book.

In addition to submitting the photos by thumb drive, the publisher required a caption list for every single photo, compiled in a Word file in numerical order. We set about making a very general set of captions at first, and then fine-tuned them in the copy edit stage.

The photos you see in this post are from a collection of pictures that did not make the final cut.

 

 

 

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 6 – Elevation Profiles

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

 

Elevation profiles are something that we really wanted to include in the guidebook, but we never really got a definitive answer from the publisher. We decided to include them as part of our manuscript submission anyway, hoping that Cicerone would see the value in including them.

I set off to work, using my GPS data to create the profiles using software on my computer. While we couldn’t use these verbatim, they could potentially be a useful reference guide for the in-house design team. The majority of Japanese hiking guidebooks include these mountain cross sections, and they really do provide an invaluable resource in the planning stages of a hike, especially when you learn how to read them. Novice hikers are unaware that a day of 1000+ vertical elevation gain is a ‘big day’ in the mountains, but experienced hikers can get an idea of the up/down involved without having to read any hike descriptions.

In the end, Cicerone agreed to include elevation profiles for each hike and trek, and all of these needed to be annotated. There ended up being a total of 27 elevation profiles for the final draft of the  book (down from the 30 we initially included with the manuscript). The effort was well worth the labor involved, as you will hopefully see when you finally get your hands on the book.

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Behind the Scenes Chapter 5 – The Maps

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

 

Maps are an integral part of any hiking guidebook and can really make the difference between a best seller and a lemon. We knew going into this project that we wanted to include high-quality, easy-to-read contour maps and Cicerone delivered.

The publisher enlisted the services of map company Lovell Johns, who have provided on-line maps of Japan that Cicerone can incorporate into their electronic mapping portal. Tom and I were provided instructions for generating the maps in the portal, which basically entailed either uploading gpx files or manually drawing routes into their system.

There was a bit of a learning curve involved, and the physical work of inputting map information for every route in the book took quite some time, as there were 30 different hikes and treks for the first draft of our book. These were further subdivided into stages for each trek, and in the end we ended up with 65 different maps that needed annotating and editing.

After our initial map data was entered into the portal, the designer send us a rough draft of every map, which included only the basic trail information. We needed to input all of the text and symbol information on each map. This was all done through pdf files, but for the first run it proved much easier to print out each map and do the mark-ups by hand, with subsequent drafts fine tuned using detailed annotations on the pdf files.

 

The hand-marked maps were sent together with a Word file which included detailed instructions and text to include on the maps. Rather than the publisher having to manually input mountain names, they could simply cut and paste from our Word file. This was important due to the sheer number of kanji characters involved in our informative maps.

This never would have been possible without the power of the Internet, where files can be instantaneously shared across the world. In addition, Adobe Acrobat Reader allowed us to mark-up drafts from the luxury of our home computers. Remember the old days, when maps were completely hand-drawn, and drafts were sent overseas by snail mail? Tom and I would have likely flown back and forth between Japan and England if our book was written just a generation ago.

 

 

 

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