Isn't it about time that I actually wrote something about my graduate career? For those of you who have been waiting for such scholarly content, your time for satisfaction has finally arrived!
One of my classes is titled : Book Publishing Overview. I love it. Or, rather, I loved the first two weeks of it. Things are starting to get a little hectic, and it's only three weeks into the semester.
For this class, we have one huge project that we will be working on during the entire semester. Essentially, we will be creating a book and going through all of the necessary steps to get it published (theoretically, of course). This entails : writing a summary of the book, writing a three to five page discussion of the book's content and rationale, creating a description of the intended audience, finding an author for the book and writing an author biography, creating an annotated table of contents of the book, and charting comparable and competing books in the past and present marketplace. Oh, but all that is just the stuff that's due within the next two weeks! The list goes on and on from everything to figuring out the costs and revenue, creating sample pages, determining specific production qualifications, creating the cover, laying out a publishing schedule, designing a marketing plan . . . it just doesn't stop.
Luckily, I am in a group of very dedicated, intelligent people. I know I can rely on them to get their work done and to do it well. Unfortunately, we see things a little differently. We have hit an early snag in our project -- figuring out what the book is going to be about.
Last week, we were given a list of vague topics. My group chose -- Time Capsules.
My initial reaction was to create a humor book -- something along the lines of what the time capsules of iconic families/individuals would include. For example, The Addams family would put Thing into their time capsule (which would be shaped like a coffin) and Marilyn Monroe would put in a used condom from one of her liaisons with JFK. The entire book would be illustrated, showing the famous family/individual and the items inside of their time capsules. I imagine satire and snide comments galore. I imagine hilarity abound. I did not, however, imagine the hesitation of my groupies.
While my groupies were intrigued by the concept, they were not sold. They were worried about marketability and such. Who would buy this book? Well, I answered, the same people who buy other humor books. How many of these could we actually sell? I responded that none of these books were best sellers, but we could still probably do pretty well.
What my groupies envisioned was a how-to book geared towards families with children.
My only problems with that idea is that A) It's so much more boring than my idea, and B) I don't know what else we would put in the book other than something along the lines of "Find a box. Put in stuff that's important to you. Now, bury it." What else is there to say about how to make a time capsule? Don't ask me.
We have yet to settle on either topic. For now, we are each brainstorming concrete ideas of what the content for either book would include. The most important thing we can decide is what direction we will be going with this project. I really hope my fun, funnest, funnerest idea pulls through, but it might be a hard sell. I have to come up with a lot of great, hilarious ideas to include in this humor book and hope I can convince my groupies of the potential greatness inherent in my idea.
I have a lot or work to do.
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