Whether drafting a first edition or revising a textbook, it's a big, complex undertaking.
It's not easy to keep track of all the many tasks, most repeated in a particular sequence for each chapter and section. These steps of the writing-revising process can add up to hundreds of individual tasks that could be easily overlooked without efficient tracking.
The video below briefly outlines the method that has worked well for me.
Making check marks on a workflow progress chart make me happy. I hope you'll find happiness the same way!
In this digital age, all those skills we learned about organizing paper files are now being used to manage digital files. And textbook authors have a LOT of digital files to organize, including
Page proofs (first round, first round with author comments, second round, etc.)
Reviews
Research articles and other resources
Correspondence
I find that besides organizing such files into disk folders with descriptive names and nested in a logical manner that makes them easy to find, the filename of each file is critically important. When I have such files open on my desktop screen or attached to an email or located in a publisher's file management platform, I'm not always clear on what file version I'm really looking at. However, if I'm careful to use filenames that tell me this information, I have less of a concern.
At the beginning of a new revision process, I usually get files from the previous edition to use as the starting point. The individual chapter files often have some esoteric name that means something to the folks that created these files—but not necessarily very meaningful to me. For example, there may be as many as four extra leading zeroes. I guess that's to allow for books that have hundreds or thousands of chapters. Sometimes these filenames include the ISBN number of the previous edition of the book. Like that's going to help me.
I usually go in and change the names of all those chapter files to something more helpful to me as I progress through the revision process. For example, I'll include the chapter number. But I only need one leading zero before the single-digit chapter numbers. That goes first, to make the file list in the folder easy to navigate.
By the way, if you forget to use leading zeroes, then chapter 2 will be listed after chapter 19 and chapter 3 will be listed after chapter 29. Leading zeroes put them where they belong.
I also add in a shorthand telling me the title and edition number I'm working on. So Structure & Function of the Body 15th edition becomes SF15e and Anatomy & Physiology 9th edition becomes AP9e.
Then I append something that tells me what version I'm dealing with. For example, draft1 or copyedit or pages1. If these are versions that contain my responses to copyediting, then I'll also append my initials or name, such as kp or kpatton.
I usually separate each of these shorthand units with a hyphen to make them easier to read at a glance. For example, 03-AP9e-copyedit-kpatton is the version that has my responses to the copyedited version of chapter three for Anatomy & Physiology 9th edition.
This seems like an awful lot of drone work, doesn't it? I agree that it would be if I typed in these filename changes in the usual way. But I don't. It literally takes me a few seconds to change the filenames of all 48 chapter files—plus several files for the glossary, front/back matter, appendices, etc. How can that be, you ask? I use a handy, cost-free tool called Bulk Rename Utility.
As the online tutorial advises, "The first thing to do is DO NOT PANIC!" It goes on to advise the user who has just picked themselves up off the floor that you don't really have to use all the controls available in the dashboard. Basic functionality—even advanced functionality—is really much simpler than it may seem with this complex screen that to me resembles the dashboard of one of those huge airliners.
You don't believe me. You think this is way over your head—something only your 11-year-old computer-gaming nephew will be able to handle. Because I know this, I've provided this videothat proves how unbelievably simple it is for even we of The Beverly Hillbillies generation can handle.
If you want a video that also walks you through the installation process (and shows you how to rename image files) then click here Renaming Files Using Bulk Rename Utility.
A couple of years ago, I decided to start two blogs to facilitate connecting with the two different groups who constitute the "users" of my textbooks: professors and students.
I had thought about doing this for some time before actually doing it . . . but I was certain that setting up a blog was complicated and time consuming. Oh, and expensive.
Well, it turns out that it is none of those. OK, setting up a blog COULD be all of those. But a great, professional-looking blog can be easy, fast, and free.
I've had a few of my colleagues ask about how it's done and they don't believe how quick and easy it is. So I decided to SHOW you all!
