Anatomy of a Book

So, for those of you who did not yet realize I have a book coming out this spring.  The Combat Position: Achieving Firefighter Readiness is being published by PennWell, under their Fire Engineering Books imprint.  As I write this I have signed off on everything that I have control of and it is now 100% on the publisher and my Editorial team to finish the project off and get it out to all you interested folks.

I thought it might be interesting to move away from the typical nature of this blog, for a moment, and give a little insight into the world of writing and publishing.  I know from emails, phone calls, and blog comments that many of you are writing or want to write.  While I am not a "professional" writer (this in no WAY pays my bills), I have written extensively and been published in magazines, online, and now have a textbook coming out... so I suppose that is some measure of consistency.

So, to answer the question that I have been asked dozens of times: How do I write?

The simple, yet true answer is that you sit down and start putting words on the page until you have some kind of intelligible essay.  Now while that is simple it is not always easy.

In the case of The Combat Position the process of developing, writing, and getting the book to the point that in a few short weeks it will be in people's hands took a solid three years.

I sketched out the original outline of the book back in the late Spring of 2007, with a working title of Igniting the Warrior Spirit.  I knew the book was going to touch on the idea of a Fire Service Warrior culture and a bit about what that would look like.  I started to write.  I tackled the subjects I had a really solid handle on first: the effects of anxiety on our cognitive processing; and the beginnings of Fireground Tactical Decision Making.  Those early drafts were turned into articles for Fire Engineering magazine and were selected by their Editorial Staff for eventual publication in the magazine.  I then got deeper into reading a researching things I had a sense of but not the deep bench of references: sleep deprivation; fitness; Stoicism.  I continued to write on Virtues and Values and Mission.  It took until the Spring of 2009 to have an outline and enough material that I felt confident submitting the book for publication.

I submitted my proposal and I waited, and waited, and I waited some more.  The wonderful thing about PennWell/Fire Engineering Books is that they attract a ton of submissions and many great authors.  The downside to submitting to PennWell is your proposal has to be read along with everyone else.  This understandably takes time.  I know having published a dozen articles by that point, including some on topics I was addressing in the book, helped, however the Editors still have to read and review everything that crosses their desk.  Finally in February of 2010 I got the phone call from the Editor who acquired my book that we had approval.  I signed my contract at FDIC 2010 at the PennWell Book Booth.  It was real.

Then the stark terror set in.  My Introduction and first two chapters were due the week after FDIC.  (I knew that going in).  I had an aggressive timeline to finish the book.  I wanted it to be on the shelf or ready to be ordered at FDIC 2011.  My final piece of manuscript went to my Editor July 28, 2010 - a full month ahead of schedule.

 What was that time like?

Crazy.  Pure and simple it was nuts.  I was writing a chapter at a time and researching for the next.  I would write for hours each day.  Some days were great, 2000 to 3000 words; others sucked. Some days I would spend hours staring at a computer screen, write 900 words and delete all of it before throwing in the towel.  Some Chapters were easy to write.  Chapter Four - The Fundamentals was pretty easy; it was all I had learned about firefighting over the course of 14 years.  Chapter Six - Making the Turn was torture; I had to figure out a way of conveying how EVERYTHING tied together.  I probably read each chapter a half dozen times while writing, and then again once my lovely wife had gone through and given it a first polishing edit.  (Side note, I am a horrible speller and have no sense of phonics.  Computers catch some stuff but it still takes a real person who knows the English language to help me out).  Then it was in the hands of the Editors.

Come the late fall I got the first Copy Edited version of the manuscript back.  Doing the copy edit review is interesting.  Basically you reread your entire book which is filled with both comments, and changes.  Not all of the changes are highlighted, so you keep a copy of the original handy and if something catches your eye that makes you say, "Why did I say that?!" you double check the original. Sometimes it was the editor changing something and sometimes you just wrote something that four months later reads terrible.  So you fix, and you polish, and you answer the Editor's comments and turn in what you hope is a better work than what you started with.

I have no idea how long a writer is supposed to take with that process but it took me exactly three and a half days.  I got the Chapters on a Monday afternoon and by Friday morning everything had been read, tweaked, reread, re-tweaked, and finally abandoned like any artistic work is.  I slept about three hours a night.  I wanted to keep on task and keep the process moving forward.  So once the files went back with me having stamped FINAL on all of them I figured it was wait for layout.  Alas, nothing in life is that simple.  The beginning of December brought a final round of Editorial comments, questions, and fixes.  Once again, the goal was to put as fine a polish as possible on the book.  Once a book hits layout it is very expensive and time consuming to make changes.  So you do it when it is still a manuscript.

So I sat down for a few more late nights of re-reading and re-working until finally the Editors and I felt like we had a good book.

It's interesting to see how you have to adjust some times to deal with a host of factors.  One thing that I feel very happy about is that at no time did the team at PennWell ever expect a change that we couldn't find a fix for.  Some of their suggestions (particularly Marla Paterson the head editor and Jerry Naylis my acquisitions editor) made really improved the overall quality of the book.  There were a few things where I dug my heels in and we found compromises.  All in all I think that the level of hard work and dedication turned out a quality piece of writing (and I hope you all like it too!).

So once the final Copyediting is finished the book goes to artists for layout.  That process takes some time.  Every piece of text has to be made to fit the final trim size of the book, all the photos, graphics, charts and tables have to be placed, and all of the captions have to be in the right spot.  The layout artists do a heck of a job creating something that is both attractive and readable.

Eventually you get back what looks like it might someday be a book... if someone feeds it, and waters it, and leaves it out in the sun a bit.  These are galleys.  It is what a book will look like in it's final format.  Guess what happens now?

Yep... you read the entire book, again.  When you read the galleys you are making sure nothing got messed up when it was moved from a manuscript format into a finished book format.  In my case that meant reading 277 pages of book, including front matter (all the stuff before Chapter 1), and making sure all the photos were right.  I forced myself to read the whole book in about 11 hours.  Every word (there are a little over 86,000 words in the book give or take).  This is the ABSOLUTE last chance to make sure everything is right.  So you go through and make sure that the quotes are quoted, and that text is in the right spot.  You do silly things like make sure all the end marks are there on sentences, and that there are no randomly mixed up sentences.  Then, when you are all done you wait a few hours (at least I did) and look at it one last time hoping that you caught everything and that it is well and truly the best work it can be.  Then you pat the large stack of paper and shoot an email to your production editor (in my case the very able Tony Quinn) saying that it's good to go.

There are other things that happen of course.  I changed the title a few times before we finally settled on The Combat Position.  You have to look at ideas for a cover, and review what the back cover will look like.  We tell out children, "Don't judge a book by it's cover," yet we all do.  So you want the best front and back cover you can come up with.  I think we did a nice job.

That's what it will look like folks.  The photos are by Dennis Walus, www.detroitfiregroundimages.com and he did a great job.  He hunted through his archives and found great shots that help tell the story of just how difficult the fireground is.

Dennis gets a couple of T-Shirts and more than a few Pints at FDIC this year.

So, right now the book is being indexed and then it is off to the printer.  The book won't make the selves at FDIC, but you can order it there.  We will have some advanced copies from what I hear, and I will be teaching two courses that week: Situational Awareness on Monday and The Ready Position on Wednesday and much of the class work derives right from the book research.  Also, very soon we will have links for folks to order the book directly from PennWell, or from Amazon or Barnes & Nobel online.

So, that is the slightly short version of what it takes to get a book in print.  For each one of you who has asked about it along the way this is what was going on.  For everyone who put up with me during the three years of researching and writing... Thanks.  I'm sure I was a million miles away some days.  Most of all, thanks to each one of you who visits this blog.  It gives me a lot of hope that the message is being heard, even if it's only by the members of the Choir.  Cheers.