July 24th, 2010 09:46pm
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I’ve read a lot on blogs and Twitter recently about the question of whether self-publishing is just another name for “vanity publishing.” A little deeper is a discussion on Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer blog, “Top 10 Worst Self-Publishing Mistakes—Explained!” A lively conversation, it takes in the “Does self- equal vanity- question.” But, with an avalanche of comments, it also gets much farther. Issues such as marketing, getting reviews, and one of my favorite subjects—the use of typefaces—are raised.
Early on I offered my prescription for success as a self-publishing author:
1. Write well about something people want to read about
I suppose I missed a chance to agree with those who put marketing research as their starting point. Admittedly, I have a bias against blind marketing and what I like to call “the selling of selling.” But the truth is, one can choose to write about a subject that has a large natural audience or is particularly of the moment. I’m momentarily finishing up work on just such a subject, about the Alaskan oil pipeline.
2. Engage an editor and, perhaps, a copy editor to make sure you’ve gotten it down and gotten it right
I know many authors are loathe to entrust their babies to another caretaker, but often after spending so much “close time” with a piece of one’s own writing, perspective is lost and the author could really benefit from another pair of eyes and a professional’s “take” on the subject and presentation.
3. Contract professional, freelance book design and page comp to give your book the best chance to attract potential readers
As a freelance book designer, I, of course, remain very big on this step. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: amateur-looking design hurts the sale of a self-published book, which already has a formidable hurdle to get over, if it is to find an audience and sell more than the typical 100 or so copies most self-published books manage to sell.
The first thing potential readers see is the cover. The cover needs to invite prospects to pick up the book, at which point they should become interested in what that cover suggests is inside. Then, when they open the book, the interior design needs to connect with the cover, sort of fulfilling the promise of the look the cover puts forth. The writing, the substance of the book, should then take over, grabbing interest of readers who are led through the lines and pages of the book by the work of the interior designer.
That’s my half of the equation. Then, too, at least from the point where the book’s writing is complete, perhaps sooner, the self-publishing author should formulate a plan for reaching the people most likely to be readers of his or her book.
Following these steps and my little coda on marketing is at least a feasible plan to getting above and beyond the 100-copies sales plateau.
July 1st, 2010 11:42pm
admin
From this blog, that is.
I have five books in progress as I write this. Tuesday I completed the first pass, over 600 pages, of a nurse practitioner’s textbook. After that I zoomed into correx—the corrections and author’s changes—for a 1,000+ page novel, which I had begun while working on, and alternated with, the nurse practitioner’s textbook. Somewhere along the way I also knocked out correx on the latest chapter of a physicist’s memoir containing transliterated Sanskrit.
Most recently, like an hour ago, I sent off a second pass with author’s changes and some corrections on a book about the Alaskan pipeline. This one is particularly timely, what with the off-shore oil-drilling disaster in the Gulf still raging.
All that means tomorrow I dive into making pages for the student guide Taking Charge. I finished the design template for this book in March, if memory serves, so it will be good to see how the book finally goes down.
And those are the reasons why this blog has been on hiatus for a good five or so weeks. It’s not like I simply had no time to blog—which I most certainly did not—but not a single idea to blog about sprouted while I was so consumed with making books. (I hope to stay that busy throughout the remainder of the year.)
But one thing that keeps snaring my attention is an ongoing discussion on LinkedIn, I think, titled something like, “Does Anyone Else Wish Self-Publishing Would Go Away?” It turns out that the person who started the discussion did so expressly to get a controversial and, therefore, long-lasting exchange going. She succeeded.
Truthfully, however, it needs to be made clear for those who may not know: Self-publishing is no longer automatically synonymous with “vanity publishing.” I say that not because three of the five books I mentioned above are to be self-published by their authors, although they are my proof that self-publishing can be legitimate and self-published books can be works worthy of publication.
I have only walked away from potential projects for reasons other than that the fee offered three times in about 20 years. Both times these were to be self-published books on subjects that I found either objectionable or not helpful to my reputation. As much as I think everyone has the right to try to find an audience, I also have the right to not help ideas I do not support into the light.
That all said, Vive la self-publishing!
May 25th, 2010 12:14pm
admin
Continuing in what has become the busiest year of my life so far, and certainly the most successful in my career as a freelance book designer/layout artist, I am about to begin another “straight layout” job. That is, where I am provided a template and make some other designer’s pages.
This is, you might say, a return to my roots. I worked at least a couple of years doing such book layout work in the early ’90s before I hired on for my first interior design and layout job. I have always felt that starting out in publishing as a proofreader forced me to see, in an unerringly stripped down fashion, how words on a printed page are supposed to look. This, in turn, fostered a nitpicky concern for typography generally and an intolerance for crappy (to use the term of art) wordspacing specifically.
Doing page layout in those beginning years I simply gravitated to a line-by-line scan/search technique with my eyes—that is, looking line-by-line—to find every spot on every page in every book I worked where I might “drive a truck” through the wordspacing because it seemed so wide to me.
I took that feel for typography with me into book design projects. I always try to select types, type sizes, and line lengths that work together for maximum flexibility and efficiency in terms of how a line of type can be adjusted to avoid wide wordspacing.
So it is with a sort of “coming home” feeling that I will begin my first layout-only job in a while.
April 26th, 2010 07:45pm
admin
To recap: my first experience noodling at the making of an eBook left me cold. So the arrival of Adobe’s Creative Studio 4 and its direct-to-EPUB capability was welcome—even though I did not upgrade to CS4. And with the coming of CS5, an upgrade I have already ordered, I hope the InDesign-to-EPUB path is even more seamless.
That sums up my software news.
As big a development as the foregoing is, there is another, even more significant step toward the inclusion of eBook production in my repertoire: adding an iPad to my computer line-up of desktop (24-inch iMac with second, 23-inch, Cinema Display), laptop (17-inch MacBook Pro), and handheld (second-generation iPod Touch) completes my toolbox for troubleshooting eBooks.
* * *
What I wrote above should have been the beginning of a whole different piece than this is turning out to be.
Instead, my wife mentioned to me that in noodling through some of the hits that came up when she googled me earlier today, she came across an exchange I had somewhere online sometime back. Apparently I felt compelled to say repeatedly that had no interest in eBooks, I would never make any, and would never get myself any kind of eReader.
Well, we see how that resolved itself.
April 18th, 2010 04:38pm
admin
I enjoyed the initial design and layout of my first medical novel. Although only the first pass is complete, with corrections and changes sure to come, the best part of the creative bump is likely over. I had begun two other books while working on that novel. And I fielded other inquiries in a typical “feast” portion of the feast-or-famine freelancer’s way.
One of the other possible projects was a 500-page scifi novel. This was another potentially interesting project, though I cannot imagine it would have had as many different text elements as the medical novel. But that has led me to thinking in a different, if not new, direction: eBooks.
I’ve already gone on some about how my first exercises with the epub and mobi formats left me underwhelmed. But those, it occurred to me, don’t even scratch the surface of what a proper eBook might be. Naturally, it took the iPad—no, I have not purchased one yet, as I’m waiting for second generation, which, at the least, I expect to include a video camera—to get me thinking about the extended possibilities of eBooks.
By “extended,” I picture the ability, while reading, say, a science fiction novel about time travel, to link to material about what physics says about the possibility of traveling through time. I am not sure whether I want multimedia to be part of the material one can access, as it could distract from the reading and might make a book into more of a movie experience over time. But I also like the idea of having other material available to move on to for more information when the reader’s imagination is piqued.
As it happened, this science fiction novel didn’t happen for me. I could not agree on a price with the prospective client. I understood perfectly the financial constraints he found himself bound by, but I could not bring the project in for what he could spend. And, interestingly, that price included the cost of proofreading. I wonder whether, whatever the price, it is a good idea for the same one pair of eyes to handle the typesetting and proofreading?
March 21st, 2010 06:51pm
admin
I believe I’ve said and written it before: I like working on two books at once. They each provide breaks from the other, thus keeping me fresh and the work seeming new—or newer than it would otherwise seem.
Having worked this way a few times in the past, I know it is rare for two books to keep the same pace; but this only adds to that sense of variety that prevents me from falling into a rut. Right now, however, I have three books in production, albeit one of the three just barely. All three are interior page design and layout jobs.
The first is a novel. Short of a textbook, it is one of the most elaborate books that I have ever worked on. It is filled with many different kinds of narrative: basic text, as well as letters, articles, and certain unique pieces of copy.
The second book is a memoir. Written by a retired physicist from India who has lived and worked in U.S. a number of years, it is also meant as a serious aid to preserving the Sanskrit language. This book is less about many different kinds of design elements, the way the first book is, and more with the proper use of diacritics and the typesetting of transliterated characters.
And the third book is a lot more like many of the books I have worked on over the years. It is a new edition of a book that was set in a fairly straightforward manner the first time around. The idea is to produce more attractive pages, while maintaining the usability as the student guide that it is.
Predictably, each has a different kind of schedule. The novel and all its materials are in-house. I have taken up the basic design, laying out the first part of this lengthy work. I await the client’s feedbackbefore plunging into the whole layout. With the Indian memoir, I have gotten only as far as acclimating myself to he transliterated characters and diacritic. As of this writing, I received the finalized first chapter to begin setting type. As for the third book, I await approval of the design and all materials.
And so it will be a matter of working on what I have in-house at any time. Right now, the novel is most ready for production. But as each client sends me more material, I will work on portions of each. The one organizational rule I will maintain is to try to always have a significant page of pages in the hands of each client, so that we are all in some state of doing. And that is how I will complete three books in roughly the same time.
March 14th, 2010 12:00pm
admin
A while back I read something called The Cohen-Miller Report: The 6 Core Attributes That Make a Team “Click”. The thinking impressed me, how it distilled the traits necessary to prepare a creative team for success. The way Emily Cohen expressed it,
While there are many important aspects that influence a great team … six core attributes … are particularly important when you have right and left brain personalities working together:
- cheerleader
- industry activist
- tech guru
- emotional quarterback
- enforcer
- political navigator
This model is interesting when each trait is looked at as a personality type in a well-rounded group, but does it have a place when thinking about a one-man band, so to speak, a one-person book design practice such as I run?
No surprise, else why would I write this, but I answer the above question with a resounding, “Yes!”
My inner cheerleader, if you will, lights the spark for each project and task I take on, whether it is beginning work on a book—where it is particularly easy for me to light the proverbial fire, as I simply never et tired of the feeling of starting new and actually get excite like it is the first time, over and over again—or jump-starting my engine for another round of promotion and finding work.
The industry activist in me is also a natural facet of my personality, as I enjoy reading about book design and typography, and hearing how my fellow practitioners go about plying the book design trade. As a one-man band, I find it generally impossible to make time to attend industry events, although there are one or two that I always keep an eye out for to see if my schedule can somehow allow me to participate. As it is, I make an effort to make time to get hold of book, articles, blogs, and forums on the subject of making books.
Tech guru is less a title for me than “technology junkie.” I rarely see a new version or possible upgrade to my tools, hardware and software, that I don’t automatically want. It happens that I work on Apple’s Macintosh platform and a trip to the Apple Store, at any time, is like a trip to the toy store before Christmas. The same can be said for looking at the mail-order catalogs for Macintosh-compatible peripherals and software. But in addition to the fun of it, there is no doubting the necessity of staying abreast of the latest trends and developments for doing what I do at top quality and most efficiently.
My emotional quarterback keeps me focused on each job I am contracted for. When a client presents unexpected demands or a job challenges that I did not foresee, this is the part of my personality puzzle that keeps my eye on whatever task I need to perform. It is no small wonder to have the Internet to allow me to sit in place in my studio and research, contact the client or fellow book designers, and collect the world of information that makes it possible to meet such demands and challenges.
Enforcer may sound a little sinister, but there needs to be a bottom line trigger that always remembers for all the love of creativity, I am something of a mercenary. Have gun will travel, and all that. Sometimes choices just need to be made. Occasionally they are tough, even harsh, or simply ones I wish I didn’t have to make. Yesterday I turned down an interesting-looking project with a prestigious client. Without this “enforcer trait” I just might have taken on one project too many at this time and jeopardized my ability to do any of them well.
The political navigator exists exclusively in my universe for dealing with clients, prospective and actual. I need to be able to listen to them, sometimes ferreting out their meaning and what they want to accomplish. I also need to speak to them in a way that demonstrates I understand their needs, can express this in a way that lets them know I do, and not express in an “expert’s way” that puts them off.
See, sometimes there is an “I” in T-E-A-M.
March 10th, 2010 12:07am
admin
I remember … my first book, actually, seventeen years ago. I started with straight layout jobs; I didn’t begin to design books for years after that beginning. That first layout job was a math textbook. A good fit, as it happened, since I had earned a living as a proofreader—both in-house and freelance—for about fifteen years before that.
A math textbook, before I knew about MathType or XTensions for creating equations, meant a lot of cutting and pasting radical symbols, indicating square roots, combining many characters, and a world of back-kerning.
The autobiography/memoir I am currently working on reminded me of that first math book. Written by a retired physicist, an older gentleman who began life in India, is also the author’s attempt to preserve his native language. What this means—thank heavens not learning Sanskrit—is using one or more typefaces that transliterate the Sanskrit into English.
And so specialized fonts are in order. But there is the additional factor, really a kind of monkeywrench to overcome, of my working on the Macintosh platform—you may have heard me mention this before—and the author and editor working on PCs. This effectively throws us into further translation mode. Even though all three of us have purchased the appropriate fonts, the textfiles I have received to this point, and the printouts I had received until just yesterday, all had accented characters missing or replaced by tiny outlined squares.
I will need a complete copy of the manuscript and, interestingly, this job will force me to do something I’ve scrupulously avoided to this point: reading a book through as I work on designing and laying it out. It is now imperative I follow through, line by line and even character by character, typing in every missing character. Without the hard copy it will be a lot like Plato’s example of the distorted picture of reality one gets from observing the world only via shadows projected onto a cave wall.
How I wish these typefaces would just apply upon my importing the textfiles that have been created and worked on with the PC version of the fonts. Hopefully, just that will happen—if not magically, than by something we figure out—before I get too much deeper into this project.
February 21st, 2010 12:53am
admin
The use of type in books—choosing and combining it with other typefaces—brings the art vs. craft of book design, compared to typography, right to the fore.
Joel Friedlander writes a thoughtful piece, 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book, on the subject, from the matching perspective, it seems to me. I take another look here, from the contrasting end.
Starting with the premise that main body type has been chosen—perhaps by period and/or place, by the look of the typeface simply seeming somehow representative of the subject, or by the type’s appearance running counter to what the book is about—the very next thing is to choose a second face for display and all other non-body text uses.
For instance, last year I did interior and cover design and layout on a book named The Sutton-Taylor Feud: The Deadliest Blood Feud in Texas. It told the story of an epic family feud that began shortly after the Civil War ended and lasted past into the last decade of the nineteenth century. When I first began talking to the publisher about this book the expression “of biblical proportion” came to mind. From that, it was easy for me to start looking at old style serif types. But also cognizant that the time period wasn’t truly back to the old style era, from about 1495 through about 1725, I wanted something that was a more contemporary turn on an old style. Sabon fits the bill, as it is old style but was created by one of the masters, Jan Tschichold, “in the period 1964–1967,” according to Wikipedia.
Given that this book has Texas roots, I decided to go with a typeface that had a Western feel to it for the only non-body text elements of this book that require a display face. In the sample below, that would be the large initial cap, in Rosewood Standard Regular.
Coincidentally, I recently finished another book with historical overtones, and—again, coincidentally—though from a different publishing client, the client was another college press in Texas. This book had a whole different tone from the first. Lust, Violence, Religion: Life in Historic Waco is a sometimes bawdy, always a good read. And I did my best to make it a good- and interesting-looking book.
I chose a typeface for body text that again went with the notion of historical import—a small wink at the aforementioned bawdy character of the essays—Adobe Jenson Pro. When researching this face, the word “elegant” comes up again and again. Jenson is simply beautiful, a revival of Renaissance lines and curves. It gives weight to the subject matter it presents and, again, this seemed to fit nicely with the unexpectedly irreverent storyline (for, history or not, the book reads as entertainingly as any great story).
For the accompanying sans serif—to be used in titles, display heads, and captions—I selected Optima. Not strictly a sans, of course, Optima’s hint of serifs, tapered strokes, and slightly larger x-height than the Jenson all keep with the elegant look I had in mind for this book. Below is a page Lust, Violence, Religion.
These are just two ways to go about pairing, but not exactly matching, type.
February 10th, 2010 12:14am
admin
I came upon an interesting article the other day, Know your type: Cheltenham. The article describes the history of the typeface family Cheltenham. It reminded me of an exchange I had on one of the typeface aficionados’ forums a year or two ago. I mentioned that I liked ITC Cheltenham and had decided to use it on a book design I was doing at the time.
I must admit right off that I am partial to Old Style type—Did you know “Garalde” comes from bringing together the names “Garamond” and “Aldus”? A few of my favorites are Bembo, Adobe Garamond, Jenson, and, of course, Cheltenham. I especially like that the contrast between thick and thin strokes is not extreme with Old Style typefaces.
When I mentioned hw much I liked Cheltenham on that forum, I heard a chorus of “boos” in pretty short order. Indeed, I don’t remember anything in the way of approval for my choice. This puzzled me.
I made clear I intended to use Cheltenham for body text of the book I had in mind. And as the idsgn piece makes clear, the original Cheltenham font was designed to be “a book type in which legibility would be the dominant element.” As that is the point of good typography, and book design—to make lines of legible and pages of readable type—I still feel very good about the choice. The unique kind of look that stops readers in their tracks might be a good thing for advertising, movie posters, and even book covers; but on book interior pages, it’s just an unwanted and unadvisable distraction.
The extended ascenders and shortened descenders are, in fact, odd-looking in an interesting way; and it was good enough for the New York Times. But that was the original Cheltenham, also known as “Chelt.” By the time of ITC’s digitized Cheltenham, the x-height was increased noticeably to make a most readable type. A classic was adapted and made far better for book interiors.
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