Our manuscript deadline was December first, and even though many friends told us no one ever meets those deadlines, we did, sort of. All chapters were done being drafted by 12/1/14. Technically though, our manuscript was not really done. We spent the first half of December pulling together more of the figures and pictures for each chapters. The challenge is when you add a figure you have to renumber all the other figures in the chapter, and many of them are referred to more than once, so you have to find and change all the references, not hard, just tedious.
We also had to review edits from our fabulous editor Holly Holland, who made lots of helpful suggestions. Some were easy fixes of formatting or punctuation, others required adding a lot of new text or rearranging elements of a chapter. We spent on average 2-3 hours per chapter reviewing her edits and making changes.
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| Diana confers with Tess while Aaron rewatches a previous lesson. Cute picture right? Unfortunately to "soft" to go to press. |
Holly submitted our figures to production and we found out we needed to reshoot some images. It turns out classrooms are challenging to photograph. We had to be sure we had photo releases from all of the students and add some extra lighting so the pictures would come out sharp enough for publication. Some we had to cut because we could not reshoot them and they were just too fuzzy. We will include them when we present and I am adding one to this post for your viewing pleasure.
In early January 2015 the book officially went to the production department. It is out of our hands for a while now as the designers, and copyeditor work their magic. Meanwhile we are fielding emails about marketing, upcoming conferences, and author appearances.
Along the way we decided to change the title. Our original title was Power Up: Foundations of 1:1 Learning. The marketing team didn't love it. We kicked around some other choices. and settled on Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. We really wanted to keep the word learning in there because learning is what it is all about.
We should get copyedits to review again in late February. Once we approve those there will be page proofs, then the files will go to the printer. Whoo, hoo!
