After the news last week that I had volume one of our next publication finished, I can now add that volume two is now complete. Subject to proofing the text, getting printed proofs and getting the approval of the copyright holders. Oh, and paying a license fee and then getting printed copies. So, nearly done then.
I'm not the world's fastest designer — it's something that I kind of fell into, having picked up a few tips while working in magazines and needing to keep production costs down to a minimum here at Bear Alley Books. The first time I used a design programme was for PBO, my mid- to late-Nineties paperback fanzine, some of which have recently landed in the collection of Jules Burt, whose Youtube channel now has a video of them.
I started using InDesign back in the late 2000s and I'm still using the same version. It's on my old PC, so at some point it's going to conk out, at which point I'll have to find some freeware that, hopefully, will have caught up with InDesign's features. (I have a similar problem with PhotoShop, but I have GIMP on my laptop, which does most of the resizing and touching up that I need to do for blogs and Facebook. Saves me firing up the PC and hopefully that will extend its lifespan.)
As well as my lack of training, there's also an over-enthusiasm to get things finished. So I "finish" the work and export the files to PDFs. And, yes, the quotes are deliberate, because the moment I save the file, I spot a mistake. Last night it was a missing caption. So I corrected it and exported the file. Which is when I noticed a couple of captions that needed titles in italics. So I corrected it and exported the file. But I'd missed some of the column separators and had to fix them before exporting the file. Being an old PC, each correction and export takes a little time.
And I might add that the latest version I have saved is the version that I need to proof, so there may be further corrections to make.
Talking of time-wasting, I spent an hour trying to save myself £4.49 postage on Amazon by finding a cheap book to bump up my order to free postage. Unfortunately, everything I wanted was supplied by someone other than Amazon, which led me to trying to find the books I had decided upon on eBay... which I did and which I then spent another hour on trying various combinations to take advantage of a 4 for the price of 3 offer that one dealer had going. I spent an age trawling through wants lists to try and find a book in the same offer that was around the same price.
Final price: £27 and I still had to find yet another book that I could order through Amazon to get my free postage. I eventually found something that I wanted at a not unreasonable price that was supplied through Amazon. But I'd wasted most of an afternoon trying to spend £5.51 and ended up spending over £30.
That said, the first book I ordered arrived to day and I'm very pleased with the condition for the price, which was only a pound or two more what I would have paid for a beaten-up copy in a charity shop.
What was the book, you ask? Earthbound by Joe Haldeman. I have quite a few of his books, but there were a couple of series that I needed to complete, including the Worlds trilogy and the Marsbound trilogy. I also picked up a couple of stray one-off novels I didn't have, a collection of short stories, and one of the Gollancz SF Masterworks that I'm missing. I think I ended up ordering eight books in total rather than just the one I needed, but I bet I'm not the only collector who has done that! I should add that the majority were American paperbacks of books that never received a British paperback printing, so they're unlikely to turn up cheaply in charity shops. Here's my Joe Haldeman UK paperback cover gallery.
I've used a couple of Haldeman covers for our column header in memory of Chris Moore, who died on 7 February, aged 78. Moore was one of my favourite book cover artists, his paintings appearing on everything from the SF Masterworks series to Jilly Cooper novels—an incredibly talented artist. I loved his SF covers and he was turning out superb spacecraft and fantastic, futuristic landscapes for almost fifty years (his first being Extro by Alfred Bester in 1975).
Looking at his collection, Journeyman (which has a very good interview by Stephen Gallagher), I couldn't help but notice that the first SF Masterworks cover, for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, had previously appeared on another book, but rotated through 90 degrees. I'm now wondering how many other covers for the series were actually reprints. But that's a project for another day.
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