Chip on Your Shoulder

Michael Kodas, from The Hartford Courant, here. "High Crimes," my book looking at how the big money on Mount Everest and in other adventures in the developing world is drawing crime, started as newspaper series, which I wrote and shot while a member of the Connecticut Everest Expedition in 2004. Carolyn Moreau, my wife, wrote a blog and sent video back for the paper's Web site, and to a local television station. She was also an amazing help with the reporting.

The story that concluded the project, and led to my book contract, appeared in Northeast magazine.

I got the contract with Hyperion in the summer of 2005 and took a 16-month leave of absence to write the book, which included spending another two months on Everest, both on the Nepalese and the Tibetan sides of the mountain. I also traveled to Spain, France, Bolivia and Argentina for research. Hyperion accepted the manuscript earlier this month. The book is scheduled for publication this winter.

Here are the answers to your questions.

1.) What surprised me? I thought, when I got the contract, that a book is so big, I was just going to empty my notebooks and refer to every document I found. About 75 notebooks, a hundred hours of taped interviews, and six file cabinets of documents later, I realized I would edit just as tightly as I did for newspaper stories. I can honestly say that all of my research, notes, cyber-stalking, and document hunting really enriched me and definitely helped me write with more authority. Nonetheless, the vast majority of my notes and documents still ended up on the cutting room floor.

2.) What did I learn? Books can benefit a lot from multimedia. My photos and audio recordings, my wife's videos and blogs, all informed the book, and will be really valuable to help promote it, and get its message out. We'll be putting out a Web site with a lot of supporting material, lots of photos that aren't in the book, video, interviews and the like. The Web site won't only help promote the book, but also will provide a lot of new content for people that read it and want more, or who don't want to read the book but would like to know a little about the subject. Multimedia material is also valuable for broadcast outlets that might want to feature the book or profile the author, or even for a documentary to accompany the book. I've always reported a lot with a camera, on top of taking photos for publication. Now I'm doing much more, as well as recording natural sound, recording interviews, videotaping interviews and events, etc.

3.) What do I want to learn next? How to put down the reporting. Like a lot of newspaper people, I pride myself on staying on top of my subject, reading all the latest material that comes out every day, tracking down new sources and keeping an eye on trends. I strove, with my book, to get every new fact I learned into the book. But with books, you have to put down the reporting at some point and resign yourself to the fact that, however quickly your publishing house gets your book out, the most current information in it will still be months, or years, old. That's something I had trouble getting used to, but will be better at next time.