23 days to go before the Paperback & Pulp Book Fair and the release of my latest book, DREAMING OF UTOPIA. The race is on!
I mentioned last week that I had a deadline if I was to guarantee publication of the book, which was that day, 25 October. Actually, to make allowances for the weekend, it should have been the 23rd or 24th. But I was still working on the final article last Friday, had it finished on Saturday, and designed on Sunday. Finished up a checklist and index on Monday, put in the page numbers and gave the whole thing a very quick check.
I was up nice and early on Tuesday to finish off the cover, which I usually have problems with. That proved to be the case here, as I uploaded the image as a wraparound only to discover it was slightly oversized despite me following the guideline about how big the spine should be. Resized the cover, reuploaded and now the change of size had moved the spine lettering slightly onto the front cover.
That was when George and John arrived — both Bear Alley Books writers. John is the subject of AND THE WHEELS WENT ROUND (the link takes you to Amazon) and George wrote A LAVERDA JOURNEY, about his trip around the world, which I designed for him. George is handling sales himself (which is why the book is "currently unavailable" on Amazon, but you can see the cover at the link) and if you want a copy, just drop me a line and I'll pass your request along to George.
It was just a social call, so we had a chat and then headed down to the pub for lunch, which was most enjoyable.
Later that afternoon, I was working on the cover again.... a slight nudge of the spine lettering to the left and everything was... not OK because I'd accidentally reworked the original, which was the slightly too big version despite me renaming it so that I didn't do precisely that. After tinkering with the resized version (and with the rejected version now deleted), I had the lettering almost right, but decided to take it down a couple of points to allow for the slight movement of the printing machines.
I finally got everything just so and now I'm waiting on a printed proof to see how the colours come out.
Of course, ten minutes after paying for the printed proof, I realised I'd forgotten to put in the little end-stop I always create for the last line of articles. D'oh.
So, Tuesday the 29th was the day I ordered proofs. I will probably need a second proof before ordering a print run and I have 25 days rather than 30. Should be do-able (he says confidently), but I had a mare of a job getting the Badger Books book just so... so I'm not counting all my chickens before they hatch. But I'm hopeful—and keeping my fingers crossed—that you'll see copies on sale at the Book Fair.
I managed to catch up on a few things on Wednesday and Thursday, including backing-up quite a lot of files that had built up while I was nose to the grindstone, catching up on e-mail, looking into the background of an artist called 'Dubarry', which is obviously not his real name, but neither was his 'real' name as he was born under another name entirely. I also mowed the lawn and read a bit of a book, because that's how exciting my life is when I'm not writing. Oh, I am going to visit a little local art gallery shortly because we met and liked the artist who is exhibiting a while back and it will be great to see what she has come up with in the meantime.
A bit of culture after dealing with some of those old Utopian covers with their naked ladies. It is amazing to think that they could get away with this during and just after the war. These slim booklets are incredibly scarce nowadays and included highly collectable authors like Robert Bloch and John Wyndham (hiding behind the pen-name Johnson Harris).
Notice that I have yet to reveal the cover... that's a deliberate choice. I'm waiting to see that the colour proof looks OK before I show it off! Hopefully next week...
In the meantime, I have the text to proof.
