Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Steps in Publishing The Sermons of Martin Luther.
Volume V Printing - Finishing My Part of Volume VI Today.


Today, God willing, I am finishing up Volume VI of The Sermons of Martin Luther. At the moment I am mining the gems of this volume, which is one of the most enjoyable of all writing efforts. I get to copy and paste the best from each volume. When Volume VIII is finished, I will gather all the gems for the final volume - Gems Mined from the Sermons of Martin Luther.

Here are the steps in getting one volume into production:

  1. I copied and pasted the 8 volumes of Lenker's edition into this blog, using an unlikely source, which used lots of open source material for promoting ads.
  2. When I realized the old Lenker sets were hard to find and expensive, I decided to recreate the set with illustrations. Norma A. Boeckler was happy to illustrate them.
  3. Various people volunteered to edit the blogged sermons, which I pasted into 8 Word files. Scanning errors were varied, strange, and tedious to locate. Laity and a pastor agreed to help.
  4. First I use control-f to find typical format errors. I look for other mistakes and send that to someone to edit.
  5. The edit suggestions come back on emails, spreadsheets, whatever works.
  6. I go over each suggestion and make the changes needed.
  7. I created a table of contents and collect the gems from suggestions made. Virginia Roberts and Mrs. Ichabod mine the gems.
  8. Norma A. Boeckler inserts her art into the sermon volume. We use DropBox to send these large files back and forth.
  9. I make "final" corrections and send them to Janie Sullivan.
  10. Janie does her work for Amazon and Kindle, and I approve the proofs.
  11. Amazon may raise issues with production, so I have to deal with those. 
  12. The first printings begin to go out, first in color, then in black and white. Each volume has a color version, a BW version, and a Kindle.
  13. Donations make it possible to send a box of Luther and Lutheran books to African seminaries. Two have been sent and a third is being prepared for sending. The box costs about $90 to print and send to our contact, $100 to mail to Africa, for a total of $190.