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UPDATE on Agates and Their Story
Karen 'Agatelady' Brzys
Karen's newest (and final) agate book is currently available for purchase online for a limited time.
Unfortunately, Karen passed away suddenly on May 29, 2026. The family intends to honor her legacy and continue with the book distribution as planned.
Karen wrote:
This is my ninth book since re-opening the Gitche Gumee Museum in 1999, not including a few books I previously wrote. The self-publishing process had several stages:
— Spent time at the University of Michigan library searching for both technical and lay articles on agates published since 2009, which is the last time I did a comprehensive search for a previous agate book. In that database I compiled information from 99 different sources. This year's search resulted in almost 200 additional sources. It was so much easier to do the research this time! The entire UofM collection has been digitized so all I had to do was sit at a computer, search the data base using a variety of key words, and save the desired articles to a USB flash drive. Since I am not a faculty member or student, unfortunately I cannot remotely access the digitized collection, but I do not at all mind sitting in the library of my alma mater.
— Purchased (or borrowed) agate books published since 2009.
— Created a database compatible with the one compiled in 2009.
— Information from all the articles and books was entered into the new database, organized by key words.
— Once the new database was compiled, it was combined with the 2009 database.
— The combined database was sorted by key words.
— The keywords were organized into the new book's table of contents.
— Using the database's organized format: writing began to prepare a review draft in Microsoft Word.
— Hired Doug Moore to be the book's photographer and gave him a very long list of images I expected to need for the book.
— Lined up grammatical, technical, and rockhound editors.
— Went through thousands of photographs supplied by Doug Moore and selected the ones I needed. Verified the quality of each image, and saved them according to the printer's specifications. Added them to the review draft.
— Searched Wiki images and secured rights for other needed images. Added them to the review draft.
— Created all the diagrams and added them to the review draft.
— Finished the review draft and had it duplicated and spiral bound by a printer in Marquette.
— Sent the book our for review and incorporated changes based on reviewers' comments and suggestions.
— Created the print-ready draft in InDesign by copying text from the Microsoft draft and inserting the photographs and diagrams.
— Printed out one copy on my inkjet printer and had my primary editor look through the final draft one more time. I did the same on my digital copy, and incorporated suggestions from my primary editor.
— Converted the InDesign files to PDFs and uploaded the files to my printer.
— Made a few adjustments, as suggested by the printer, and approved the book for printing!
This project has been a tremendous challenge, but I enjoyed every minute of it!
