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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- First I use control-f to find typical format errors. I look for other mistakes and send that to someone to edit.
- The edit suggestions come back on emails, spreadsheets, whatever works.
- I go over each suggestion and make the changes needed.
- I created a table of contents and collect the gems from suggestions made. Virginia Roberts and Mrs. Ichabod mine the gems.
- Norma A. Boeckler inserts her art into the sermon volume. We use DropBox to send these large files back and forth.
- I make "final" corrections and send them to Janie Sullivan.
- Janie does her work for Amazon and Kindle, and I approve the proofs.
- Amazon may raise issues with production, so I have to deal with those.
- 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.
- 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.
