Last year, I wrote a post about What academics do over the summer ‘holidays’
Although the Undergraduate students leave around July and return in late September, everything else – research and administration – carries on as usual in their absence and is ramped up a notch!
This summer, alongside my usual PhD and M.Res student supervisions, my main task was to finalise my book on Joseph Zobel, which is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.
Finishing a book is a long, painstaking process and involves many emails between the academic author, and the book series editor, proofreader, copyeditor and other members of the team who are typesetting the book.
As academics, we send off our revised book manuscript (after we’ve taken account of the anonymous reviewer feedback our publishers have organised) as a text document using a program such as Word. We then receive careful feedback from an in-house proofreader.
Once we’ve made necessary changes and returned the file, the next stage is always the most exciting: when the new file pings into the inbox as a PDF which has been ‘typeset’ – i.e. it now looks like a book rather than a very long double-spaced student essay!
At that stage, a few gremlins inevitably creep into the PDF, so it’s necessary to read through every page with care and send lists of corrections back to the editors for revisions to the typeset copy.
When that’s done, it’s time to index (which can take a week, involves an awful lot of pressing CTRL+F)!
I’m delighted that the book is now print-ready and should be out in early 2018.
The book is the outcome of several years of intense work – the project began back in 2012, when I began drafting my proposal for funding to the AHRC. The project has taken me to Martinique, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Atlanta (Georgia) and Austin (Texas). I have also worked with partners and collaborators around Birmingham, the wider Midlands area and in London.
I’ll now be focusing on other projects, so there won’t be any more updates to the blog until my book is published…
If you’ve just found this website, thank you for dropping by, and please take a look at the extensive archives from the past three years, to see how the Zobel Project developed!
Merci!
Joseph Zobel 