is required is to setup the system so that it's available to everyone
for whom it is intended.
At the begining of the task I didn't realize that it was such a big
task. But it turned to be one. Here are 5 lessons I learnt in
compiling this ebook.
1. Plan ahead.
The ebook saw the light because I had planned ahead. I broke the
project into series of steps and I did try to do each one at a time.
For the ebook, the main tasks were gathering the material from the
blog. Organising the material, formating, making PDFs and finally
launcing.
This were the high level steps, which were furthur broken down to
smaller tasks to get the work done.
2. Get maximum done in the intial push
This was perhaps the best thing I did for this ebook project.
Downloading some selected, related content from 750+ post of my-aesi!
I utilized the initial enthusiasm for the ebook to acomplish this
tasks within days of setting the goal to finish this project.
Since I have limited time and limited access to net, so this motivated
me to push through and I did the first two tasks of getting the
content and organising them fairly quick.
3. Keep off topic when stuck
After the initial two tasks, came the formating and this gave me
headaches. Literally I never thought formating will be so difficult.
I have written countless documents for office but never had any
formatting issue but this was not the case with this ebook.
I was stuck and it is at this stage of the ebook, I had doubts and I
wanted to scrap the whole project.
Here I just let go off the project and let it lay down low in my daily
tasks. I thought of ways to format and tried different formating
styles in word but never touched the ebook. I was incubating ideas. I
was waiting for inspiration. And I didn't wait in vain. Eventually I
did felt like picking the ebook and went with the first formating that
came to my mind.
Well it was not perfect but I tweaked and tweaked and got something I
liked.
4. Formating is the not trivial
As I found formating is not trivial. This was the greatest lesson for
me. Yes I have authored many reports and document but there was none
that big and as wordy as this project. The reports at office had
tables and graphs and some text sandwiched. But in this ebook text was
the bread. So had to learn few formating tricks!!
5. Chip in daily.
In the initial stage, enthusiasm of a big project sailed me through
two of the major tasks. But as I moved to next stage, the enthusiasm
eroded. The engine stopped.
This is were self discipline came handy. I had set an hour a day for
this project and even when I didn't feel like I have any desire to
work on this project, I chipped on.
I didn't feel like taking up the ebook, but I began tinkering with the
formating with some dummy reports. I began researching on the tools to
convert doc to pdf.
So even when I didn't do anything directly for the project, indirectly
I kept chipping. This not only help me save the project but made me
more confident in word and showed me numerous ways to convert word
documents to PDFs.
This were the lessons I have learnt in writing this ebook. I hope you
will pick up something from this experience.
I am at the final stage of launching the ebook. Do bear with me some
more. Hope you will like the ebook and find it useful.
