the production of Steve Donoghue's first ebook

Steve Donoghue has written thousands of reviews, and probably the majority are available online - but they're scattered. The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, blogs with broken links. He's always wanted to assemble those pieces thematically, into books, but the assembly, editing, and formatting - taken together - are a full-time job.

I'm the editor, Alex Sorondo, who's helping him out with the task, assembling a volume of his presidential writing, re-formatting it to fit an ebook, and editing the text so it's more readable. I host "Thousand Movie Project Podcast," which has played host to Steve on a number of occasions, and here's what I'm doing:

1) Going through reams upon reams of Google and in-site searches to find all of Steve's pertinent reviews. I'm collecting those reviews into an index (hyperlinks included). I'm grouping those links under chapter headings.

2) I've sent Steve that index so that, from the slew of a few hundred, he could select a few dozen. I copied those from their source pages, re-format them for the ebook -- and, along the way, edited for typos and the stylistic trappings of a book review (parenthetical asides about jacket price, the author's earlier work, competing titles of the season). My goal is to tweak the prose so that it drops that here's-the-facts utilitarian vibe (which review editors often impose), and help to elicit the naturally conversational voice underneath, and to have that voice pick up its own momentum as it moves through the history of the presidency.

3) The book is nearly finished. Just formatting the latter two thirds, and waiting on Steve's new material.

4) I'll be collecting and poring through submissions of artwork to make sure the book has a nice cover.

It's ultimately up to Steve if he wants this book published. The only people who are guaranteed to see it are those who donate a little something to the project.

What your donation goes toward is the labor, essentially. Not the grunt and sweat of it, but the hours. I'd like to get this done by December and will likely shrug off some restaurant shifts in order to do so.

Thank you so much for your help! And stay tuned to this page for updates on the project.