Writing a Book Using Google Docs

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Guest post: Writing a book using Google Docs Looking for posts on your Monday, November 01, 2010 favorite product? Labels: documents, Google Apps Blog, Guest Post Google Sites Documents Guest post: November is National Writing Month and to celebrate, we’ve invited Dr. Steven Daviss Spreadsheets to talk about how he used Google Docs to write a book with two colleagues. Dr. Daviss is currently Presentations the Chairman of Psychiatry at Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Maryland and has been Forms increasingly leveraging his clinical and administrative experience towards a career merging health Drawings care policy, informatics, and health care reform. Docs list

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Followers (5351) More » Two other psychiatrists (Anne Hanson and Dinah Miller) and I have been writing a popular blog (Shrink Rap) about the practice of psychiatry since 2006. A year later, we started a podcast (My Three Shrinks) that has received great reviews in iTunes. Late in 2007, we decided to take some of those posts and weave them together to write a book.

We started out using a desktop word processor to write the book, each chapter being a separate document. We learned about the limitations of making edits and sending out each of our revisions to the other two: we very quickly had multiple out-of-sync versions and the whole thing was a mess. This is from one of Dinah’s emails back then: “With 3 people doing this, I need to be able to keep track of what everyone wants to write. As I revise it, I'll change the file to reflect the date, but remember that if you and steve are sending me changes and edits simultaneously, I may not see Already a member? Sign in them or it may get very confusing. Your color is red.”

After several weeks of this, we were all seeing red, which was causing a lot of unnecessary tension. We Love Feedback Have a story to tell? Let us know I had used Google Docs collaboratively before to write a couple articles and a few grant proposals, how you're using Docs. but wasn’t sure if we could successfully use it to write an entire 250-plus page book. But I knew it had to be better than what we were doing. Visit our Google Group to discuss Google Docs. Once we switched to Google Docs, writing the book together became a much more fluid process because we were able to focus on the writing and not on the complications of getting the technology Useful Links to keep up with us. We imported the first couple chapters and proceeded from there, making each Google Docs Home chapter a separate document shared by the three of us and (eventually) our editor. We could write our own chapters privately until they were ready to show our co-authors, then sharing was as simple Help Center as clicking a couple buttons. Whenever we changed our minds about what to take out, we were able Help Forum to restore sections from previously saved versions. We didn’t have to think about which version of Product Tour word processing software someone was using, or if the documents would lose formatting between New Features Mac and Windows. And, I could see when my co-authors were also working on the book, so I knew For Work or School when to call and talk about the project.

Eighteen months after getting the book contract, we had a completed manuscript ready for copy Google Apps Blog editing. These posts and more from other apps. Google Docs also helped to save our relationship. Initially, despite being good friends, the three of us had many conflicts about the technology and about the way we wanted to write (e.g., grammar, More Blogs from Google tense, tone, characters). When we were using emailed versions of documents, our arguments Visit our directory for more increased. After switching to Google Docs, we went back to our usual level of bickering ;-). information about Google blogs. The book is being typeset now by Johns Hopkins University Press and will be out in May of 2011. And we have Google Docs to thank.

Posted by: Steve Daviss MD

| Email Post Subscribe to receive posts via email Share: Email: Subscribe Visit this group 12 comments: This blog is powered by Blogger. Saqib Ali said... Start your own weblog. Question for Dr. Daviss,

It is helpful to have a grammar checker, especially when you are co-authoring a 250+ page manuscript. How did you cope with fact that Google Docs doesn't have built-in automated Grammar Checker? Did that increase the arguments about the correct grammar among the three authors? Or did you cut and pasted the manuscript in MS Word during the compilation process to check for grammatical errors?

Thanks, Saqib

11/1/10 10:55 AM

Hillary said...

I actually wrote a blog post about using Google Docs for NaNoWriMo and for writing a fiction last week if your readers might find it helpful.

Why Google Docs is a writer's best friend: writing on the go, instant back-ups, advanced organization & tons of space

I highly recommend Google Docs for just about any writing project!

11/1/10 11:34 AM

Antonello said...

I write my novel with google docs! Very nice ;)

"Face to Facebook" (italian language) http://blogaiuto.blogspot.com/p/face-to-facebook.html

11/1/10 11:40 AM

Christian Bokhove said...

Can I make a ToC in Google Docs

11/1/10 11:41 AM Shawn said...

Spell checking is built in. Words that are misspelled are underlined. Right click and you get suggestions. Info is here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py? hl=en&answer=57859

Yes you can do a TOC using the headers options (like Word does). Info is here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106342

11/1/10 1:01 PM

Steve Daviss MD DFAPA said...

Saqib, We relied on our own idea of correct grammar. Mostly, we got it right but there were the occasional disagreements about affect/effect, that/which, and the numerous squabbles about verb tense. I did not miss the grammar checker, to tell you the truth. We did not run any of it through Word's checker (at least, I did not). Our copyeditor made all the revisions after we were done with it, but the majority of the revisions had to do with publishing house styles and writing more clearly and succinctly.

11/1/10 3:15 PM

Steve Daviss MD DFAPA said...

Christian, we tried a TOC but found it to be a PIA so we did it by hand. Had we known of the method Shawn points out, it would have been smoother.

11/1/10 3:18 PM ahab said...

"We imported the first couple chapters and proceeded from there, making each chapter a separate document shared by the three of us and (eventually) our editor."

"Eighteen months after getting the book contract, we had a completed manuscript ready for copy editing. [...] The book is being typeset now by Johns Hopkins University Press and will be out in May of 2011. "

Steve, am I correct - referring to above quotes - that you and your colleagues, found Goggle Docs allowing you to work collaboratively on your book, a most important feature, but the typesetting and size limit (I guess that's the reason you split up the original document in separate chapter documents) lesser features?

If you had to advise Google Docs team on which parts of the editor they should enhance which advice would that be?

11/2/10 5:27 AM

Steve Daviss MD DFAPA said...

Ahab, I didn't see either of these things as issues, but I'll think out loud on them a bit here.

TYPESETTING: Each publisher has their own rules on things like: o Chapter 9 vs Chapter Nine o 1980's vs 1980s o "a, b, and c" or "a, b and c" o gender usage o use of italics o use of commas, hyphens, and emdashes

I don't see a need for Google to address this sort of issue. However, they could make Docs more friendly for editing by others. Compare Docs just doesn't cut it. The annotation feature (highlighting text and insert a comment), for example, could be improved upon so that one click could accept the suggested edit (like Word's Track Changes). A toggle switch to turn on and off text color that is different for each contributor would be helpful -- makes it easy to see who added what.

Another VERY useful addition would be a sort of heat map showing the cumulative changes that have occurred to a document. The more changes, the hotter the text-background color gets. Could also maybe toggle the color to indicate the Recency of the edits rather than the Frequency of them. Such additions would make it a lot easier to see at a glance where changes have been made to a group document. Clicking on the hot areas would bring out a pop-up of the chronology of changes over time (hello Wave), allowing reversion to a prior edit for that segment of text.

SIZE LIMITS: Didn't know there were any. We made each chapter a document for ease of our own administration. If Docs had a simple way to package a group of docs into a package, say a folder that one could zip up and send/save, that might help some, but it's not compelling.

Pagination tools would be nice. We couldn't share it and say "look at the the 2nd paragraph on page 13" because there were no page numbers and the page formatting changes for each user's printer/screen.

Word tools would also be nice. Not just a word count (already present) but a word frequency and word/phrase indexing tool. It would have to be kind of smart -- "walk", "walks", and "walking" would be combined, for example.

Finally, a co-editor location tool might be nice. Currently, if a co-editor is in the same document, you can see that they are there but not where (unless their cursor is within the same screen's worth of text that you are looking at). I'm thinking of a simple line representing the entire document and colored dots on the line representing where one is within that document. Like this: ______..______.______

Three people are in the above document, the third being in the middle of the doc, and the first two are on the same page. The dots would pulse to indicate that that person is typing. Imagine what this might look like if 150 people were viewing (or editing!) the 2400-page Health Care Reform bill!

11/2/10 7:36 AM

RipperDoc said...

I am also co-authoring a book using Google Docs. We started a few years ago when Docs was Writely, so we have had to live through all evolutions of the product.

I agree with Steves final comments, but my request to the Google Docs team is to be able to count words based on who wrote them. If you are serious in promoting co-authoring, there must be a way to calculate work put into it. It should not be too difficult, considering the new version history shows who wrote what (it just doesn't sum it up for us).

Would that be possible to have?

11/3/10 1:02 AM

Roy said...

Great idea, RipperDoc!

11/3/10 7:45 AM

Ronald Lewis said...

Wonderful! I used Google Docs for portions of my book as well. The experience was great!

Best,

Ronald Lewis Denver, Colorado http://ronaldlewis.com

3/5/11 9:55 AM