How to Write a Book

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

This evening’s talk is sponsored by the

• the BCS
• the VRS
• The Royal Family
• Harrods
• and the Devonshire Arms.

I understand that after last year’s after-dinner talk Rae had many requests from you.
But he ignored them all and invited me back again.

I don’t have to remind you that life is very hectic, and as the Internet increasingly,
takes over our lives, we seem to have less spare time to relax and enjoy ourselves.

But there is time, but you have to look for it.

• My own day begins at 4.30 a.m. when I take breakfast in bed.

• There’s nothing like a few rashers of bacon, a fried egg, a slice of black blood
sausage and a large mushroom to put your stomach in top gear.

My wife prefers a small bowl of corn flakes.

I then take a shower.

• Our au pair is normally first in the shower, and if I’m really pushed for time we
share the hot water. This makes a significant contribution to global warming.

Before leaving for work

• I cut the grass

• trim the hedges
• have another go at removing a tree stump
• finish off some painting.

and then it’s off to lectures, tutorials, staff meetings, email, voice messages,
resignations, QAA meetings, RAE meetings, the daily post, etc.

And before I know it, the day is over and I am driving home to my wife.

• We always dine together and talk about our individual days.

•
And then I
• polish the cars
• decorate a bedroom or two
• hold the satellite dish whilst my wife looks at Sky’s Discovery programme: The
First World War in Black and White.
• read the dog a story
• and it’s off to bed, ready for another early start and breakfast in bed.

Now I know what you are thinking.

You are asking yourself “What do I do in my spare time?”

How do I fill those long empty boring periods with something constructive and
useful?

Well, I write books. Which is the topic of my talk tonight.

I want to persuade you to consider writing a book in your spare time.

It was Rae who first introduced me to the pleasures of writing books.

In 1985 I discovered that his own publishing efforts had caused terrible demands on
the world’s paper supplies.

The Amazon rain forests were being razed to the ground to support titles such as
• “Virtual Reality Applications and the Single Woman”
• “The Joy of Mobile Media” with a foreword by Anne Widdecomb.
• “Visualising Anne Widdecombe in IMAX”
• “John Prescott: The Age of Intelligent Agents”.

Rae soon convinced me that I, too, could say goodbye to spare time by writing books.

Twenty years later we have edited and co-authored several books that have included:

• “The Digital Media Future is Coming”

• “The Analogue Past is Converging with the Digital Future”
• “Bill Gates: Our Part in his Downfall”
• “When is the Digital Future Coming?”
• “The Joy of e-Sex”
• “Multi, Mobile, Virtual, Converging, Digital Media”
• “The Joy of John Prescott” with a foreword by William Hague.
• “Who Said the Digital Future is Coming?”

Now, I must admit that not all of these books have been best sellers, but that’s not the
point.

The point is that when you are writing a book, you will not waste your time on
holidays, television, relaxing, walks and sleeping.

Before you start writing a book, ask yourself these simple questions:

• Can I write?
• Do I have anything to write about?
• Am I really interested in anything?
• Will anyone read my book?

If the answers to these questions is

• NO
then you have no problems. Just start writing.

If the answer to these questions is

• YES
then you have problems.

You have to:

• learn to write
• find something to write about
• become interested in a something
• and hope that people will like reading your book.

Next find a publisher.

They will ask you to complete a book proposal form.

This requires you to:

• Give an outline of your book
• Identify any competition
• Describe why your book is better than the competition
• Provide the names and addresses of several hundred friends who have promised to
buy your book.

You then sign a contract which guarantees you

• 10% of every book sold.
• The publisher and the bookseller takes the other 90%.

I know what you are thinking:

“How do publishers make any profit out of selling books?”

It’s difficult, I know.

But authors can help by:

• not using any coloured images

• choose cheap meals if invited to dine with the publisher
• produce a camera-ready manuscript
• design the cover
• write all the publicity material
• produce the index
• do all the proof reading
With this help, the publisher’s 90% just about covers their internal costs.

So you are ready. You have

• a title
• a publisher
• a contract
• You have warned Rae to leave some of the Amazon rain forest for your own
masterpiece
• You switch on your computer
• Double click on Microsoft’s WORD icon
• And the adventure begins.

Now I have just completed a book called

• “Mathematics for Computer Graphics fast”
• with a foreword by John Prescott.

I thought that his name would give some

• weight, (24 stone at the last weigh-in)
• prestige
• excitement
• grandeur
• eloquence
• and a sense of je ne sais quoi to my humble tome.

The publisher made my life easier by providing me with an electronic WORD

template for the book.

Basically, this gives you a complete book with empty pages.

There are chapter headings, a contents section, page numbers, an index, headers and
footers.

I wanted to write a maths book, because it is a subject I enjoy, and I wanted to

communicate everything I had discovered about the subject to my readers.

However, such sentiments caused many problems.

My main problem was

• to keep the book to 200 pages
• and yet cover the subject to a reasonable level
• I wanted to tell the reader about the origin of words such as algebra, cosine and
vector
• I wanted to tell them something about the mathematicians behind their
mathematics
• And I wanted to make it accurate and above all interesting.

For over a year my bedtime reading has consisted of:

• Handbook of Mathematics and Computational Science
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers
• High-Resolution Computer Graphics
• A Vector Space Approach to Geometry
• The Mathematical Universe
• An Introduction to Quaternions

After about 6 months, my book had grown to 100 pages, an equal number of diagrams
and a few hundred equations.

At this stage the publisher sent me a new WORD template, which included different
typefaces, and bigger margins (to make the book fatter and use more trees).

When I converted to this new template I found that all my diagrams lost their
annotation, and the equations were too small.

I spent a month converting diagrams and equations to the new format.

The WORD document was now becoming rather large, and took 3 to 4 minutes to
save to disk.

This was very frustrating, and forced me to type for long periods without saving the
file.

On more than one occasion, I input several diagrams, dozens of equations, pages of
text before attempting to save the file to disk.

When I clicked on the save icon the computer whirred away recording three hours of
hard work.

And then the following message came up

• “The C drive is full, please delete some files and save the file again”.

I scanned the C drive using Microsoft Explorer and discovered that it was not full.

Nevertheless, I deleted some files as a token gesture, and attempted to save the file
again.

WORD refused.

There was no choice but to switch off the computer and start again.

I promised Bill Gates that one day I would get even with him, and I went to bed
exhausted.

The following day I switched on the computer and activated WORD.

It reminded me that I had switched off WORD without saving the file, and would I
like a copy of the auto recovery file?

“Yes please Bill, yes please!”

I apologised to Bill Gates for calling him obscene names the night before.

I am sure he would understand.

WORD gave me access to an earlier copy of my book.

It didn’t contain all of the lost work, but some data had been recovered.

I started again to input the diagrams, text and equations.

This time I would save the manuscript every 15 minutes.

I double-clicked the save icon again, and WORD told me that the C drive was full,
etc. etc.

I promised Bill Gates and Microsoft that this time I really would get him.

Even if his Californian mansion had 128 bedrooms, I would track him down and
delete his C drive.

I scanned the manuscript looking for a reason why WORD could not save the file.

I deleted a few words here, changed a few words there, turned a comma to a semi-
colon, and tried again.

This time it worked. WORD saved the file to the C drive.

The second half of the book was more difficult than the first as I had to describe the
mathematics behind 3D curves and surface geometry.

My son told me that I could use Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet package to produce
graphs, and one weekend he gave me a short tutorial.

It was true, Excel could turn equations into graphs, which could be cut and pasted to a
WORD document.

I wrote 50 such programs and carefully cut and pasted the graphs into my electronic
manuscript.

The result was very professional.

The weeks went by and the manuscript had grown to 150 pages.

Then one day, I switched on the computer and discovered that all the Excel graphs
had disappeared from the manuscript.
They had been replaced with large red crosses.

By this time I had started a Microsoft swear box.

I had secured a plan of Bill Gates’ mansion and had booked my flight to the States.

I used WORD’s help facility to discover the significance of the big red crosses.

There was no advice, and nothing more to do but cut and paste them in again. This
took an entire day.

On two further occasions the graphs disappeared for no reason and were replaced by
red crosses.

On two further occasions I cut and pasted them in again.

I then discovered a book:

• User-Friendly using Microsoft WORD 97: The fast and easy way to learn.

There was a section on converting large files to a group of smaller files, particularly
useful when writing books.

I emptied the swear box and sat down one Saturday to implement this wonderful idea.

I managed to cut up the book into individual chapters, but in so doing lost control of
typefaces, pagination and some diagrams.

That night I went to bed physically exhausted and mentally drained. The swear box
was full again, and I was another step closer to Bill Gates’ bedroom.

As individual chapters were completed I repeatedly read them in bed looking for
mathematical and grammatical errors.

I changed punctuation, moved illustrations until every page was perfectly balanced.

The printed form was now starting to look like a real book.

The book was now over 220 pages long with several hundred equations and 180
illustrations.

I had spent weeks adjusting the layout of every page. All the publisher had to do was
photograph the individual pages and print the book, and send me my 10%.

I set aside a whole weekend to build the index.

And then that fateful day arrived when I printed out the manuscript and saved the file
to a ZIP disk.
It all worked.

I emptied the swear box, cancelled my flight to California, and gave Bill another
chance.

I went to the Post Office and sent the package recorded delivery.

“How much is it worth?” asked the lady behind the counter.

“That’s a year of my life in there” I said.

“Well how much is a year of your life worth?” she joked.

“It’s priceless” I said.

“Bill Gates almost died, and I nearly went mad”

I paid £4 and 5 Megabytes of digital blood, sweat and tears was taken away from me.

I went back to talking to my wife, walking with my dog and breakfast in bed.

Then a few days later the publisher sent me an email.

“Dear John, thank you for your manuscript. It is excellent. In fact it is so good that we
have decided to have it professionally typeset with new diagrams and …”

The rest of the message never reached my brain.

All that work.

All those weekends formatting text and diagrams.

The weeks I spent changing the size of several hundred equations.

Reading the manuscript over and over again to detect the smallest of mistakes.

How could they? Why didn’t they tell me? Didn’t they know that Bill Gates almost
lost his life?

But then, perhaps they were right.

Perhaps, they would make a better job than me.

So now I’m waiting to proof-read the first draft of the manuscript.

Is there a moral to this story? No.

But there is an epilogue.

Dear Bill
I would like a WORD in your ear.
Do you know the global pain you cause world-wide?
Do you know how many swear boxes exist in your name?
Do you know how many books could have been written, if it had not been for
WORD?
One day someone will push more than a WORD in your ear.
Sleep tight but watch out for Anne Widdecomb and John Prescott.
Yours sincerely

Rae Earnshaw

So Ladies and Gentlemen

But why should I have all the fun?

• You too can have near-death experiences.

• You too can have sleepless nights.
• You too can help save the publishers of the world.
• Live dangerously, write a book, TODAY.