Tuesday, December 12, 2017

One Book's Progress



Spener seems to have gathered Luther's sermons, and there is a history behind the collection Lenker organized and edited, with the help of translators from various synods. His background was decidedly non-SynCon.

Various people have republished the Lenker edition, including an Internet version in PDF form, in various languages.

I found the whole set at a site called God Rules. I downloaded that to the blog, which was a big venture, but lots of fun.

I took those sermons from the blog and put them in Word, which we began to edit. That included members of our church, a Missouri pastor, and a Missouri member. Norma A. Boeckler agreed to illustrate it.

I took the initial edits and went through each volume. Some were scanning errors and rather funny. Others were subtle errors in citations, which can happen for many reasons. The Lenker print edition had its own errors, and one edition (mine) conflicted with another one (Virginia Roberts').

After fixing as much as I can, I go over all the format issues, which means reading the volume forwards and backwards. Sometimes looking for mistakes is reason to bypass reading comprehension. But some passages are so arresting that I slow down and read paragraphs.

Norma A. Boeckler inserts her art in the finished volume or the nearly finished one. I go through it again because the volumes are blurring together in my mind now. There are peculiar repetitive errors I try to catch with control-f. And broken paragraphs.

Janie Sullivan gets the completed file. She polishes the format and submits to the rules of Amazon and Kindle. She finds errors and irons out mistakes I left behind. I "fixed" some things and introduced some new glitches.

Are we done yet? No. Amazon has to check it with its software. Sometimes an issue will come up. Then I get the proof to check and OK.

Once the book is OKed, the title can be added to the author's page and social media picks it up.

Method in the Madness
Why bother, since many things are already in the public domain? The current list, which includes a number of books in full color, costs a grand total of $90 to send to one address in the USA. It costs another $100 to send to Africa.

It is a lot of work but also very satisfying. Everytime someone enjoys Luther for the first time, an angel gets his wings. Really.

 
 Thx. LOL.