Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn’t occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It’s a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn’t much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas.
This is why I’m going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I’ll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I’m actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don’t want to slip any further).
Sorry Michael.
Anyways, I’m working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I’m really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the manuscript (I’ve always viewed myself as a bit of a perfectionist, and it’s always possible to improve something, so it’s really hard to turn the chapters in on time, because that means letting go).
I have independently decided that I want to include more in chapters three and four though, and the review team without my prompting suggested more content for chapter four, so it’s now a case of sitting down and making that happen. Well, back to work.