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

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