Republishing - Part II

In addition to republishing my own book, Ghost Writer, I am also helping friends republish their books. The first one I did was our friend, Bob (Robert L.) Schwenck’s, Digging Deep. This book originally came out in 1979, and it has been out-of-print since the mid-eighties.

I always liked the book about dream and biblical symbols. However, the original read much like a textbook. I wanted the new edition to be more reader-friendly without watering down the original information.

Unfortunately, the book was so old no digital copy exists. Fortunately, we had an old paperback copy of the original. So, I started re-typing the book from the beginning. After I had done a few chapters, Larry started at the back and re-typed a chapter at a time, working forward. When we were about two-thirds of the way done, I realized I had an OCR (Optical Character Reader) and could scan the pages. After using the OCR, I copied the characters into a new Word document. Unfortunately, the OCR doesn’t read all characters correctly, and it loses nearly all the formatting. So, the first task was to restore the original text.

The book included number of pen-and-ink drawings. Larry scanned those, and we added them back into the manuscript before publishing.

Bob had recently done a color painting based on one of these drawings. Larry used this painting as the cover image.

I think it is a great improvement over the original, which none of us really liked. What do you think?

Once we had all the chapters in digital form, I did a complete edit in order to remove the repetition and make it more reader-friendly.

Bob reviewed everything and made changes, corrections, additions. He also added a prologue and an additional chapter.

Finally, we sent the completed manuscript to some beta readers. They returned comments, which we included in the front matter.

Once published, the book now exists in ebook and paperback form, and readers can now enjoy it again.