My writing journey and the tools used

I found writing and publishing the book, Samuel Carvosso (1814–1874): Coachbuilder & much more, absorbing, and I learnt many things along the way. My spouse remarked how much of my working life’s project management and engineering skills were brought to bear: ‘so different’ from the approaches used by others.

I have listed the steps in chronological order, although there was plenty of back-tracking and iterations along the way.

My aims included:

• Primarily an historical biography of Samuel Carvosso but with Appendices of family members or previous and subsequent generations to provide context.
• Sufficient context background for people unfamiliar with the history.
• Probably an over abundance of direct quotes to ensure the times speak for themselves rather than through my lens.

The steps

• Define the intended audience and purpose of the book and keep it in mind throughout: I used to write to a narrow band of technical people but realised I wanted to reach 15 year-olds through to PhD level readers. Quite a breadth. I kept this in mind throughout, keeping the typesetting on each page simple, and improving readability with many figures, while packing plenty of detail in the appendices and endnotes for the researcher.
• Focus on Samuel’s era and immediate family–both women and men: A previous Genealogy SA TT Reed Book of the Year Award winner told me that he had been challenged by his niece to include all the women descendants too. This he did, although it doubled his work. I followed suit. This led me to focus on both Samuel and, where limited information was available, his wife Louisa. Their descendants were limited to only one or two generations. Otherwise, the research and size of the book would have been overwhelming. These decisions proved foundational, allowing me to focus on my research and writing.
• Show not tell: I found this writing suggestion a little hard to understand until I reframed it to ‘tell the story but don’t provide my insights.’ Taking this approach, I hope that my wide range of readers will have the freedom to make their own conclusions about Samuel, Louisa, and the rest of the family.
• Legal issues
  • <400 words per block
  •  <800 words from all quoted work. I did quote one author for more than 800 words in the Appendices. He graciously gave written permission to use his words.
  •  Newspapers – If this is for family history and not a commercial project and the newspaper was ‘published pre-1955, the use of the newspaper quote/content falls under the “open license for newspaper content’. This greatly reduced the permission-seeking work, but I did provide a reference for each source in the Endnotes.
  •  Illustrations required permissions, typically requiring a fee to be paid. This put a break on how many I used as the costs soon added up. Fortunately, some sources gave their permission without charging a fee. Besides the State and National art galleries, I also used the State Library and the Cornwall Royal Institute.
  •  Copyright Council fact sheets: https://www.copyright.org.au/browse/book/ACC-Family-Histories-&-Copyright-INFO042/
  •  https://www.copyright.com.au/copyright-licence-news-magazines/
• Writing a published work requires looking at the legal issues. This was a little daunting. However, the following principles were followed:
• Quotes were limited to:
• <400 words per block
• <800 words from all quoted work. I did quote one author for more than 800 words in the appendices. He graciously gave written permission to use his words.
• Where I exceeded this, I received written approval from the originator (copyright holder).
• Newspapers: This book was for family history, not a commercial project, where for newspapers published pre-1955, the quote/content falls under the ‘open license for newspaper content’. This greatly reduced the permission-seeking work, but I did provide a reference for each source in the endnotes.
• Illustrations required permissions, typically requiring a fee to be paid. This put a break on how many I used as the costs soon added up. Fortunately, some sources gave their permission without charge. Besides the State and National art galleries, I also used the State Library and the Cornwall Royal Institute.
• Copyright Council of Australia fact sheets proved informative: https://www.copyright.org.au/browse/book/ACC-Family-Histories-&-Copyright-INFO042/ and https://www.copyright.com.au/copyright-licence-news-magazines/.
• Pamphlets from the Society of Authors–Self-publishing books: I found their pamphlets online to be useful. Nevertheless, there were also many online sites and library books on self-publishing that I also read.
• Style Manual: The Australian Government’s Style Manual, https://www.stylemanual.gov.au, was familiar to me from my professional working life. I started with this format protocol, though I had to adjust it from technical writing to the industry norm for biographies. The main impact was how I treated quotations. For less than 20 words, I used single quotation marks within the paragraph. For longer quotations, I used an indented quote block without quotation marks. The publisher’s typesetter took final control of the formatting.
• Writing style books: I browsed several books from the library and my wife’s bookshelves. I can recommend the following, but the list is far from exhaustive:
• Lamott, Anne, Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life
• King, Stephen, On Writing
• Swain, Dwight V, Techniques of the Selling Writer
• Grammar books: In the end, I relied on Grammarly to correct and ensure a uniform approach. Word’s more recent Editor is also excellent. However, the following book was useful throughout my writing: Strunk Jnr, William and White EB, The Elements of Style.
• Research sources
• Trove, the National Library online site for a large range of newspapers, Newspapers & Gazettes Home – Trove (nla.gov.au), proved my most valuable source of information. I did need to trial various spellings in ‘Search’ because both the original publications and the OCR text conversions created errors.
• State Library of South Australia’s family history section has a broad range of family histories, biographies, state history, almanacs/yearbooks, and microfiche. All proved useful sources and helped me decide on a unique approach for my book.
• State Records of South Australia: The Research Centre at Gepps Cross was most helpful in providing access to boxes of original documents.
• SAILIS, the online site of the Land Services SA provided land sales documents including listings of land owned and sold in the early years https://sailis.lssa.com.au.
• Walkerville Wesleyan Cemetery advised where Samuel was buried (unmarked) and provided a list of the family members in the same ‘family’ plot. 
• The Historical Society of the Uniting Church in South Australia. 
• British Newspapers was not free but gave similar access to UK newspapers as Trove did for Australian. I paid for a month and went hell for leather. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
• Royal Cornwall Institute https://www.royalcornwallmuseum.org.uk/
• Lloyd’s register of ships online provided ship details, voyages, and ships’ captains. Lloyd’s Register of Ships Online | Archive & Library | Heritage & Education Centre (lrfoundation.org.uk)
• Ancestry.com provided a rich though sometimes inaccurate source of details. Its message system put me in contact with family members I would otherwise have not found. Or rather, they found me!
• PhD paper searches provided two surprising sources of information and the authors willing to support me.
• Web articles.
• Google maps, Google earth.
• Scrivener: I was very familiar with Word but its limitations against purpose-built authoring software were too apparent. My wife already had Scrivener from a creative writing course recommendation. Checking the pros and cons I saw it was one of the best for a biography/family history book. It was particularly useful for controlling many versions, and enabling quick reshuffling of material until I was happy with the structure of the body and the appendices.
• Research folders contained much of my reference material could be saved in one file. It did become large, so backups were taking up a lot of space. I later moved much of the reference material, especially images, into an archive folder to reduce the Scrivener file size.
• Target hours, and hours to go per chapter and sub-chapter, could be set up and appeared on the screen while typing.
• Styles were used, which were later easily exported to Word for the editor check, proofreading and typesetting.
• There were many other features I used or tried. The only downside was the pages of shortcut keystrokes worth learning. If only I was writing another book to use my knowledge!
• Zotero: I used Zotero to manage my bibliographical references, as commonly used in tertiary courses. It also allowed me to store text and PDF copies of source material against the reference. A single click recorded the complete reference from a newspaper article.
• The Chicago Manual of Style was adopted by a single key stroke at setup of Zotero.
• I used Zotero throughout my research of sources, and then used Scrivener for inserting references with automatic numbering and assembly of endnotes.
• The downside was creating the endnotes once exported to Word. There were several procedures available on the internet. However, I wanted numbered endnotes. No single procedure worked for me. It took some hair-pulling time to develop a procedure. I now have a workflow you may request for free.
• Figures and tables: Sources and permissions: About 60 illustrations and 10 tables were selected to immerse the reader into the era, but the costs for permissions and the time for quality improving and insertion were much greater than expected.
• Vector software for maps and family trees: The best advice I found about family trees was to custom draw your own. I chose a free vector software package, Inkscape, to draw the portions of family trees off Ancestry as would be useful for the reader. Vector format ensures crisp images with small file size. It did take me a week to learn how to use it from online free tutorials, and then another week to draw my trees and two maps, but it was worth it.
• Structure: I gave the structure a lot of thought and trailed different versions by moving portions of text around in Scrivener. I chose a chronological approach, with each area of Samuel’s life given a complete section of its own. This was settled by the completion of the Beta version. Beta reviewers had only one suggestion, to split up the Cornwall section into more chapters, which I adopted. I had a lot of material which, if added, would take away from the focus on Samuel. So, I placed this in the appendices for further reading and a starting point for others to research.
• Publisher: The initial meeting with the owner of Greenhill Publishing (GHP) was foundational for setting up the size of book, overall typesetting style, paper colour, and use of greyscale images. This moved me from what I was thinking as an amateur, to a professional product. The final book has been readily accepted by libraries and buyers as a professional book. The selection of fonts and styles was left entirely to GHP with a very pleasing result and no loss of sleep for me. The advice and setting up in IngramSpark and AmazonKDP, legal library deposits, proof copy checking, etc. have all been professionally managed by GHP, releasing me from a lot of worry.
• Cover: Friend Alex Gatley, a graphic designer, came up with a timeless cover which I am very pleased with. I looked at a range of biography and family history covers but I think Alex nailed this!
• Word and pdf: I left exporting to Word until I was nearly finished in Scrivener. The editor needed Word for tracking changes, and the publisher for importing into their typesetting package. Only when all changes and corrections were made did I proceed with populating and fine tuning the table of contents, table of figures, tables, and endnotes (bibliography) created from Zotero.
• Indexing: This was laborious. I first used Index Generator to generate a Concordance which listed all words. The list was reduced manually to what I considered the important index words people may want to look up. Word then inserted an index, using the separate Concordance document. It automatically added field codes throughout the document and listed the words with page numbers in an index section. Finally, I deleted unhelpful page number references in the Index by deleting its field code on pages throughout the book. I am a great fan of indexes, so I considered this week-long activity worth it. How to Geek, www.howtogeek.com, is one site that takes you through the steps.
• Grammarly versus Word Editor: During the latter stages of editing, Word launched its Editor. This proved helpful though Grammarly has far more features including writing style suggestions and plagiarism checking. It can also be your check editor saving the cost of employing an editor. My proof editor found little to correct for grammar and spelling.
• Lessons learnt for next time (both the good and the bad)
• I am still thinking about this, but hopefully I will have greater confidence to ask for reviewer comments.
• Checklists: The following checklist is heavily abbreviated but indicates the focus of each stage:

• Checklist
  • Edit Check in Scrivener, before exporting to Word for final type setting by the Publisher:
    • Cross references to and from Appendixes.
    • Cross references to and from Figures and Tables.
    • Style checks all block quotes
    • Search and check; ´s.
    • Spell check
    • Hyphens , non-breaking –, en – , em —
    • Indents
    • Parenthesis
    • Double spaces, missing spaces, missing periods etc.
    • Word frequency check
  • Proof Check in Word, before submitting to Publisher.
    • Grammarly check for consistent grammar and style.
    • Many other grammar and style checks at sentence, then paragraph then chapter level.
    • Read aloud and/or playback with speech
    • Read the proof word for word against the original copy (if provided).
    • Read the proof straight through without checking against the original.
    • Check the date.
    • Check the headers, footers, or other headings that contain standard information.
    • Check the page numbers.
    • Check the copyright statement, if applicable.
    • Check chapter titles or article titles (and page numbers) against the table of contents.
    • Check chapter and/or section numbering.
    • Check figure and table numbering.
    • Check subheads for consistency. Also check their format (e.g., indention and font) and numbering.
    • Check proper names to be sure they are consistently spelled and capitalized. Place a checkmark next to any verified proper names (when editing on paper).
    • Check superscripts against footnotes or endnotes to be sure they correspond and that none are missing.
    • Check every jump and cross-reference.
    • Check parentheses to be sure that all are paired and that there are no parentheses within parentheses.
    • Check running heads.
    • Check any captions.
    • Check quotation marks to be sure that all are paired and that there are no double quotation marks within double quotation marks.
    • Check arithmetic, such as columns of numbers and pie charts.
    • Check for widows (a single word at the beginning of a page) and orphans (a single word at the end of a paragraph).
    • Check for stacked breaks (more than two consecutive lines ending with hyphens).
    • Check series of words or phrases for parallel structure.
    • Check paragraph indents for consistency.
    • Watch for font and size changes.
    • Run a spell-check on the file, if possible.
    • In the justified copy, watch for excessively tight or loose lines.
    • Cover
    • Binder
    • Back and back blurb
    • Correct images used for each figure?
    • ToC Figures
    • ToC Tables
    • Endnotes
    • Index
    • Index
• Grammarly versus Word Editor: During the latter stages of editing, Word launched its Editor. This proved helpful though Grammarly has far more features including writing style suggestions and plagiarism checking. It can also be your check editor saving the cost of employing an editor. My proof editor found little to correct for grammar and spelling.
• Lessons learnt for next time, both the good and the bad – I am still thinking about this, but hopefully I will have greater confidence to ask for reviewer comments.

Useful links

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