Writing an eText Book: progress update IV

Well, it has been awhile since I last put out an eText Book update (13 March 2012 - to be exact - see Writing an eText Book: progress update III), that is 3 months!

In the last three months I have not been idle. I took 2 weeks off for a skiing holiday (and even then I was still thinking about eLearning - see "Skiing Beaver Creek, Colorado, and eLearning"), I had a fairly major overseas business trip (I may say more about that in a later post), I carried out a lot of analysis for a scientific paper I was working on with colleagues (yes, there is still some science left in this old dog), and I have been busy with marking exams, and doing some 'external examining' (and I think there is a blog post or two in that as well).

Back in March the book stats were:

Words: 24,000

Pages: 115

Graphics: 50

Questions: 90

When I have not been dashing around the globe, and marking (oh, the exotic and wild life style of an academic) I have been working on the book. I have been doing some writing, and I also carried out a major edit and reorganisation of the material.

After my 'editing' session the word count dropped to 21,000 (this is why I always tell students not to obsess on getting to a word count as you can sometimes have days when your word count drops, so you don't feel you have done anything and this can be quite disheartening, whereas in fact the edit has resulted in a better piece of work), but since then I have moved on to:

Words: 36,000

Pages: 156

Graphics: 74

Questions: 120

So I have not been too idle.... I am making progress (just).

I have however missed my first draft deadline (which was the end of May), and I am now aiming for a first draft by the end of July. I might get the first draft done before then as I only have around 1 chapter left to write (although it is a tough one), plus the glossary. One thing that really slowed me down in April was the discovery that I didn't know as much about something as I thought I did. This only really became apparent when I started to write about it! That was a wake-up call.

All the 'tools' I am using are still working great. iBook Author is chugging along nicely and seems to be able to handle the 156 page document without too much fuss.

Anyway, better get back to marking... and maybe a bit more work on the book.

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