Behind the Scenes 

In the author's own words this page presents the story behind the book. Here are Jerry Kirkpatrick's comments about Applying Principles.  

The book publishes my first ten years of blog essays, 125 posted between 2007 and 2016. Sometime, probably in the ninth year of writing the blog, I thought of putting all of the posts together into a Kindle book using whatever cover design I could come up with myself. After the tenth year was completed I kept putting off the idea, as I was still working on Independent Judgment and Introspection, not published until 2019. Also, doing a Kindle only collection did not appeal to me as strongly as the publication of a book written from scratch, as were my previous three books.

However, last fall, 2020, I began serious work on the Kindle and epub version usings Jutoh software. It was a slog. I first organized all the essays into chapters and put them into the software. Then, I read them, checking all links by going to the source and searching new links for those that had degraded.

Late in the year I decided to put the book into print format, both paperback and hardcover. That meant going from Jutoh to Adobe InDesign for the typesetting. I enjoy typesetting a book using InDesign, but it seemed easier (and more motivating) to go from a manuscript in Microsoft Word to InDesign than from an already finished elecronic text to print. My main stumbling block, as I mention in the preface to the print edition, was what do I do with the hyperlinks. After a couple of false starts, I finally settled on the "abbreviated, less formal citations" that are there. The task, which included searching for titles, dates, and authors, which I did not have to worry about in the blogs or ebook versions, took time to accomplish. But I like looking at an attractively finished product and I believe I have produced it.

At some point during the whole process, I decided I should do an index, eventually for both the print and electronic versions, and pay for a professional cover design. Good indexes provide more information than the table of contents and I have read that historians often look first at the index of a book they are consideering buying. I always look at the contents first, but also will see if there is a good—meaning detailed—index and spend a little time browsing the entries.

Indexing takes awhile to do and the author is the best person to do it. Doing an index for an ebook is a whole nother issue.*

Many assume that ebooks can be searched, so why bother with an index. The answer is that you have to know which terms to search. And an index gives you not just terms used by the author, but also synonyms and classifications that you might not have thought of. Locators (page references in the print edition) are a challenge in ebook indexes and I have not yet found a satisfactory solution. In both of my ebook indexes (this one and the previous one), I have included the page references from the print editions. In Independent Judgment and Introspection, I linked the ebook references to the beginning of the page in the print book, an onerous task. In the present work, I linked to the beginning of the relevant blog post. Both indexes have been prepared the old fashioned way, that is, by hand. I have not been convinced that electronic indexes prepared in Word, InDesign, or Jutoh can be as detailed as the ones I have produced. Professional indexers have apparently mastered the one or two—from my perspective, not easy-to-learn—indexing softwares on the market. (For tips on ebook indexing see this.)

Finally, probably sooner rather than later in the process, I realized that I had to ask Michele DeFilipo at 1106Design in Phoenix to do the cover design for this book, the fourth one that she and her crew have designed for me.

Will I do a second ten years? First, I have to get there and I have asked that question several times in the present process. Most likely. The final product is worth it!

* "Nother," by the way, is a word, since the fourteenth century!