Today’s #MisinformationNation thread (3 days til publication!) is about numbers.
It might not be interesting if you have published a book, but I think I would have liked to read this thread while I was writing the book.
It might not be interesting if you have published a book, but I think I would have liked to read this thread while I was writing the book.
First, length: the book has 110k words (726k characters, 1,733 paragraphs).
In Word, that worked out to 312 pages of text and 80 pages of endnotes (double spaced/Times New Roman/12). When typeset, it worked out to 226 pages of text (with one illustration) and 37 pages of notes.
In Word, that worked out to 312 pages of text and 80 pages of endnotes (double spaced/Times New Roman/12). When typeset, it worked out to 226 pages of text (with one illustration) and 37 pages of notes.
By the way, I was surprised by this! I expected it to come out well into the 300s in print. Honestly, I had no idea how long it would end up being until I saw it.
Since I had nine chapters, I tried to keep each of them reasonably short. I aimed for chapters around 9,000 words. That’s about where I ended up for most of them.
Second, words. The most common words were news (773 times), American (410), French (396), information (349), newspapers (341), revolution (327), and British (323).
Here’s a word cloud illustrating this…
Here’s a word cloud illustrating this…
Third: data. My book is largely based on a dataset of around 40,000 citations from North American newspapers to papers abroad. I wish I could count the number of excel spreadsheets I used.
More upsetting numbers... number of months it took to build that dataset: about five. Number of times in the book that directly cite this dataset? Five.
Fourth, time.
Time to write the dissertation (from diss proposal defense to diss defense): 1,176 days.
Time to revise (from diss defense until I submitted to the press): roughly 955 days.
Time to write the dissertation (from diss proposal defense to diss defense): 1,176 days.
Time to revise (from diss defense until I submitted to the press): roughly 955 days.
After I submitted it to the press, it will have taken 585 days to publication. That’s pretty good for an academic press, given the time spent on peer review, revisions, copyediting, typesetting, indexing, and a million other things behind the scenes.
And finally, and most importantly, the ISBN number: 978-1-4214-4449-9.
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