The reason why publishing a book is the most difficult process is because the result is so unpredictable. Some books get rejected by dozens of publishers before making a big breakthrough in the literary world. It's easy for a publisher to look at Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss and assume that he's on drugs and nobody would buy something so ridiculous, but obviously lots of kids ended up liking books like that. Sometimes the book is also adjusted to fit the taste of a potential audience, and sometimes it's not and that causes problems. The Interview is a great example of a movie that faced lots of issues with its audience.

The "harriest chapter in the book," or Chapter 13 of Kawasaki and Welch's APE, actually did seem pretty hairy (harry?) to me.

And I had to look up exactly what "hairy" meant here. And it wasn't an abundance of hair.
It apparently means "alarming and difficult."

This makes sense! I mean self-publishing, like we've repeatedly been told is in many ways a GREAT thing. But it is particularly quite hairy because there are so many ways to do it--and deciding which one to use is especially alarming and sometimes difficult for beginners in the world of self-publishing.

These chapters covered very difficult nuts and bolts information. As a writer I like to think that once I write something that will be the end of the hard stuff. Yet, these chapters very much pointed out that the hard stuff is just getting started. There is just so much to the publishing world that it seems impossible to publish anything all by yourself, but it is possible if you are willing to work hard at it.

I have enjoyed reading from the APE book the most out of all of the books for class we have read so far and I highly recommend it to anyone looking toward publishing any of their work. Out of all thirteen chapters we were assigned to read this weekend, I enjoyed Chapter 8 the most because it talked a lot about editing and copyediting.

This is something I am really interested in right now as a potential career. For class, I am taking an actual book published by Parlor Press, and am converting it into an ebook. This is work I have never done before, but I really LOVE it.

This week the Atlas team continued to make progress on the collaborative project. I was able to show the team the Atlas interface and how to create a new file, and this helped everyone get a better sense of what the program really does.

The design team has conducted some research on the Atlas application that will be included in our case study. Now, they're focusing their attention on the Atlas interface and working with CSS style sheets and HTML coding so that we can create a well-designed book.

We've decided to meet outside of class again right after Spring Break so that we can check in on our progress.