In the writing journey, I only see my words, ideas, principles, and frameworks in Microsoft Word. Which is great! (Not as great as it used to be in WordPerfect, but those days are long gone.)
When I write I go over everything again and again
When I write I go over everything again and again. When I start writing something new, I always go back to the previous start of a section or chapter and read that again to get my mind “up to speed” so to speak. It’s rare that I don’t edit this older section (and not uncommon that I reverse something I changed before; it all depends on how the words hit me each time!), but then I, to use another metaphor, hit the ground running in continuing the writing onward and through the book.
Before I handed in the entire manuscript (or just ms in publishing lingo) in early June, I read through every chapter again, start to finish, making sure I was happy with everything, as well as looking for any connections between chapters, concepts, phrases, and words that I might have missed when focused on a chapter at a time. And I was very happy with it. (Very!) I turned my attention to other matters (such as writing more Substack posts, business development, golf, book permission requests, new programmatic offerings to support book readers, golf, etc.).
And I was VERY happy with it
Then in early July the publisher sent me the copyedited ms – where they edit it to improve grammar, ask for clarifications, suggest changes, additions, and subtractions). I then had to go through it with a fine-toothed comb to ensure everything in it was still to my liking, since the publisher made a lot of minor changes, and asked a lot of questions, some of which yielded some major changes. So here each Word document for each chapter becomes filled with edits, comments, comment responses, comment response responses, and so forth. It makes it much harder to see words through the edits, and I often read things over and over to make sure they sound good and make sense. And again I was very happy with it.
I turned that version back to the publisher a month ago, and then there were a lot of back-and-forths with several editors involved, including some battles on issues (which I won’t get into), many of which I won and some of which I lost. Well, that’s not exactly true. I never lost. If I “gave in” it was because they convinced me that in the end they were right, even if it meant I had to “kill some darlings” (to use an old writerly phrase).
I did have to “kill some darlings”
A few weeks ago I received the “page proofs”. This is where it gets out of Word and looks like the actual book will look. These are a joy to go through! It looks so clean and, well, bookish, and I can now see it with fresh eyes.
The page proofs gave me joy!
The downside is I can’t change anything big. I must keep paragraphs and especially pagination as they are, but can change words and short phrases, sometimes having to delete something to add something of similar length. There were a lot of changes throughout still, especially where all the tracked changes in Word caused an error, such as double periods or extra spaces. (The publisher editors would find all these as well, but I take no chances and mark everything I find.) There was only one significant thing, some new data on a key example that was published in July. I could fit that in the paper, but it adds an endnote and I don’t know yet whether that will be a problem.
Below I include some of the pages to show you what the book looks like, including the cover page (which repeats the jacket cover, the Table of Contents, and then page 9, where I introduce the Transformation Economy. You can see there the indications of some comments, where the first one corrects an error and the others were to make a few word changes.
Below I include some of the pages to show you what the book looks like
I have to say again what a joy it is to go through the page proofs, reading the whole thing again from cover to cover (minus the actual covers). I can’t tell you how many times a smile creeped across my face where I in effect thought (and probably said aloud a few times), “Wow, that’s good.”
I hope you, too, find it that good when it is finally published!
Joe
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II
