Publishing systems

Thursday’s Lotus

Date: 2016

Roles: Fac totum! Content author, book producer and publisher,

Product: Thursday’s Lotus: The Life and Work of Fuengsin Trafford (1936-1995) is a biography of my mother that was twenty years in the making. It involved considerable research, including some fieldwork, in which I devised an image-assisted interview process.

The book was produced in Microsoft Word and self-published using CreateSpace. I strove to produce a polished work, employing editors and an indexer and spent time fine-tuning the layout; perhaps the greatest compliment I have received was from an IT Manager, who asked if I had typeset the work in LaTeX.

Websites: https://fuengsin.org/, https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LZ82DYY/, https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/thursday-s-lotus

Book cover featuring a lake full of pink lotuses above the title (Thursday's Lotus: The Life and Work of Fuengsin Trafford) and author — Thursday’s Lotus – front cover

Thursday's Lotus copyright page showing title, URL (fuengsin.org), author name, cover designer (Chanaphan Rassameepiyarak), copyright type ('all rights reserved'), ISBN, typeset fonts (Gentium Plus and TH Sarabun New) and version. — Thursday’s Lotus copyright page

Thursday's Lotus title page with a lotus flower — Thursday’s Lotus title page

Contents page for Thursday's Lotus, starting with list of illustrations and ending with 'About the Author' — Thursday’s Lotus – Contents

A list of figures (photographs concerning Fuengsin and her relatives) — Thursday’s Lotus – List of Illustrations

First two pages of chapter 5: with one photo per page, each with captions (figures). They were all taken at Don Muang Airport, Bangkok and show Fuengsin with respectively monks and her parents. — Thursday’s Lotus – Layout for 2 photos and text

Double page spread with a greeting postcard on the left (with message) and two photos on the right, taken at Thonburi Technical College, one showing Fuengsin with colleagues, the other depicting Fuengsin and students coming for "an English Department examination as heavy rain falls". — Thursday’s Lotus – Layout for 3 photos and text

An extract of the index for Thursday's Lotus, showing entries from Abhidhamma to Ajahn Gaew, and from Ananda Bodhi to art — Thursday’s Lotus Index (part)

The first five entries of the glossary - for Phra Abhidhamma, Ajahn, Ambedkar, Phra Ananda Bodhi and anapanasati — Thursday’s Lotus – Glossary

Thursday’s Lotus – ePub version

Date: 2016 – 2017

I followed up the publication of the hard copy with an ePub version, which I published through Kindle and also Kobo. I initially made the conversion manually, exporting the book as filtered HTML from Word and gradually cleaning it up and augmenting it until it was ready to submit as an ePub file.

Once I had some grasp of the process, I worked on a proof of concept of a web-based service that would provide automated assistance for this stepwise refinement, which I provisionally called pen2epub. It includes various types of content validation. Most of the slides below are screenshots from that system