After Volume I came out, I immediately set to work on Volume II, spending an average of 3 or 4 hours a day on it. Last week, I finished it, only to find that it was so big that it in turn had to be broken in two. The full book will therefore be three volumes. I'm going to need a larger shelf.
Merely having finished the first draft doesn't mean I'm done with it, of course. I'm now reading through it, catching more typographical errors than I thought I was capable of producing, and making sentences parse more easily. Once I've done that, I'll send it to the editor, who'll send it to the copy editor, who will make hundreds and hundreds of minor changes that I'll have to approve of or reject on a case-by-case basis. I'll also have to produce a bibliography, which should be easy except that MS Word doesn't put citations in footnotes into the automatic bibliography it generates, so I have to go through all those and temporarily place them where they'll be picked up. Once the proofs come back, I have a very short time to create an index (I think this is a ploy to limit the size of the index), then off it goes to publication.
When it's published, I can look through it at my leisure and be horrified to see all the typographical errors that the sub-editor and I missed, and all the changes I accepted that I shouldn't have accepted. My favourite among the latter is where on page 444, what should say "well being immersed ", actually says "well-being immersed".
I'll do Volume II first, then move on to the new Volume III. The hardest task for this will be finding some public-domain pre-AI cover art to use that looks suitably mystical.
I don't know how well Volume I is selling, but I received some royalties for it yesterday so it's looking good. The editor hasn't politely told me that Volumes II and III are no longer required, anyway.
