At the same time, it is a terrific-looking book with plenty of interesting elements. But taken all together, it gets in the way of reading the book. And I love to read.

Isn’t a book’s design really not supposed to get in the way of the reading? (I mean, I know I write and say all the time that a book’s design should not separate a reader from a book. I’ve always known this—just instinctively at first, and then I knew it—as I learned about making pages and setting type. But really.

I stare right now at the last page I was able to make my way through before it became impossible. My eyes actually began to feel sore as I struggled to focus on the page. And, strangely, it’s not as if the page or the whole book is a total eyesore, exactly. There’s an attractive precision to it. In the upper left corner of this page, a verso, positioned to run vertically is a subhead in, maybe, 36- or 42-point type, some sans serif. (I am not very good at coming up with the names of type on sight, no matter how much I set.)

Under the vertically-oriented subhead is a narrow display column of, perhaps, 7- or 8-point sans serif. Widely-leaded for legibility, it is still a bit small for reading more than just a couple of lines; and there are 31 such narrow lines there.

The main text area is more than 30 picas wide. The text there is set double line-spaced, in about 10- or 11-point boldface sans serif. There’s just way too much sans serif type to be read.

Then there’s a tiny 5- or 6-point sans serif in light blue, lightface sans serif. Tough to read. And if that’s not enough there’s a footnote in tinier sans serif still. I can’t really make it out without my reading glasses, which I don’t ordinarily need unless my eyes are exhausted.

Now, the only defense I can make for this designer—who is big-time famous and doesn’t need defending by little, ol’ me—is that he is also the book’s author. But still.

First, my feeling is that, while his “take” on page design should be required reading, I would never call it “the rules,” because it was just such rigidity in which he expressed himself at times that I reject. But I still think there is benefit to learning the way Tschichold thought books should be designed.

I read a translation of “Die neue Typographie” some time ago. I would love to have read—and to own—a copy of The Form of the Book. Only thing is, the one time I had the spare cash to lay out for a copy—it’s apparently rare and, therefore, priced dearly—I opted to spend $400 on a 30-year old bottle of scotch. No regrets there, but I still would give my eyeteeth for a copy of of The Form of the Book.

Tschichold, I think, is hard to appreciate truly without placing him in context. I do not totally reject his theory that the best text page is unadorned and plain, so that nothing comes between the reader and the author’s words. Consider that he came from a time and place when books were typeset in that heavy, unreadable German blackletter type. Just a horribly distracting—and now all but illegible—way to see printed words. But his leap to the plainest sans serif available to him at the time, Akzidenz Grotesk, although both an improvement and the most practical choice available to him led him down a path that, some years later, Tschichold himself plled back from publicly.

As for his perfect text area proportion, there are many harmonious ratios to set type by. Both Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Designing books: practice and theory by Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross do good jobs of discussing a whole range of such ratios. Bringhurst pays particular attention to those based on organic, mechanical, and musical proportions. Tschichold likely would have none of this, as much as for any reason, I suspect, as that he didn’t think of them. I mean, this was a man who, when he lectured, did not permit questions.

So I do appreciate him, I just don’t cotton to him. And next Christmas I would like another bottle of 30-year old scotch and a copy of The Form of the Book.

That is not to say I never want to work for a traditional publisher, though by all accounts the traditional publishing model is in big trouble. I simply recognize the advantages of the streamlined self-publishing process.

Let me give you a for-instance.

A question about something I notice in a textfile I bring into the book document as I make pages can take days to get answered from a traditional publisher, as it makes its way from my contact person—usually a production editor or head of the design department—to the editor on the project and maybe even the author. Additionally, if some irregularity in the writing, something inconsistent with what the author did earlier, surfaces, it would not be out of the question for the structure of a traditional publisher to discourage my pointing it ut.

Working with a self-publisher, I always find myself and the author-client rowing in the same direction: doing whatever we can to make the best possible books, even if it means my commenting about a sudden change in the narrative voice, say. The best thing, overall, however, is the expeditious process for asking questions and receiving answers. As little a thing as this may sound like, quick, clear communication again makes any project a better experience and a good book more likely.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.