Wendy Wednesday: Pencils Down!

Pencils down, volunteers! Because we have finished transcribing all the videos! I really wish you could see the happy dance that I am doing in my head right now! Because it is a GOOD happy dance!!

	Record	Splice	Transcribe	Proof (Vol.)	Proof (Prof.)	ePubify	ePublish	Paper Layout*	Paper Publish*
SB5 Video	complete	complete	complete	complete	complete	not started	not started	stretch goal	stretch goal
HB2 Video	complete	complete	complete	complete	complete	not started	not started	stretch goal	stretch goal
SB1 Video	complete	complete	complete	complete	complete	not started	not started	stretch goal	stretch goal
Citizen (1)	complete	complete	complete	complete	complete	not started	not started	stretch goal	stretch goal
Citizen (2)	complete	Complete	complete	complete	working	not started	not started	stretch goal	stretch goal

That one remaining orange square means that the final video has been sent off to the professional editor for final proofing and editing. The final video! There is officially no more transcribing work to be done on this project! Yayayayayayayaya!

So! What comes next?

Well, first of all: I need to start putting the proofed scripts into Sigil (my ebook editor) so that I can get a readable version of this baby out the door. Several of you have asked if you can help on this stage, and I cannot tell you enough how much I appreciate the help, but it will be faster and easier if I do this part on my own. I'll probably be harder-than-usual to reach for a couple weeks while I work this, but I'll try not to let this affect my posting schedule too much.

Once the proofed scripts are in Sigil, there will be a flurry of eReader testing (thank you bunches to those who volunteered to be beta testers--if you'd like to be one of those, send me an email and tell me which eReader you'll be testing it on because that'll help me a lot) and then the final product will go up in the Amazon store to be followed (hopefully closely!) by other stores like Barnes and Noble. Fortunately this isn't my first rodeo on that front.

If you were a volunteer on this project, and if you are not getting my update emails, and if you would like to get my update emails, please send me an email telling me your new email address (or telling me that you haven't heard from me, and we can troubleshoot from there). I mention this because I intend to send out a few private updates on this project in addition to the public ones and you might wanna be in on that! (If you don't, that's okay too! I know not everyone wants to be spammed on this!)

The final question is prolly: How long will this take? That's trickier to answer. It takes me about 12 hours of work to copy-and-paste the individual transcript documents into the big one for the editor. (Part of the length of time has to do with cleaning up artifacts between document types. As several of you have already run into, the conversion from one type of file extension can do wonderful things, like stripping out spaces!) Moving from .doc to .epub can be even more sensitive, as I found when I was publishing my novel a couple years ago.

My rough estimate right now is 2 full days per transcript, so that's 10 days total to get a rough draft out for the beta users. Then maybe another 5 days to polish any errors they find, plus whatever time they needed to find the errors in the first place. Since I need to keep working my day job during this time, that means a lot of this will be done over weekends and evenings. My goal is to get this finalized and loaded into the Amazon Kindle store by May 1st, which I think is something that I can meet. That would also mean that it's available for public consumption for 6 months prior to the election cycle (if I count correctly), which I think will be amazing.

On a final note, I want to thank everyone involved in this project for the amazing, truly amazing, work that you've all done on this. I know without a shadow of a doubt that I could not have done this without all of you and I cannot thank you all enough from the bottom of my heart. Every time I feel lonely as a Texan or frightened about the state of healthcare in my state--feelings I get often these days--I remember what so many people have reached out to do for us and I don't feel quite so alone. Thank you.