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Writing and Publishing, Part 15:
Creating the book:
Prepress work:
The publishing house is the focus of the creative part of the
publishing industry. Here, is where the creator/author delivers
his masterpiece. Here also is where the book is designed and laid
out. In addition, the publisher is responsible for cover design,
the actual book manufacturing, and for marketing. The functions
are, pre-press, manufacturing and marketing. In this essay, I
want to deal with the prepress work. I will deal with manufacturing
and marketing later on.
Once a decision is made to publish a book, it must be prepared for the manufacturing process. This preparation includes cover design, conversion of graphic material to electronic files, and book layout. All of this is done using a computer with a variety of software. There are also decisions on book dimensions and type face to consider. Much of what is done here has to do with marketing.
Cover design has everything to do with marketing and, sometimes, nothing to do with the contents of the book. Everyone has seen the garish covers with raised gold letters and brilliant color splashed all over the place. At Wesoomi, we believe that simple elegance is best for most covers.
I believe cover design should be done by someone who understands the printing process in cooperation with the writer and the publisher who understand the story or message of the book. I am leery of folks who call themselves designers. The ones I have seen tend to want to show off their imaginative skills rather than work to enhance the book. We must remember the most important things in cover design, which are the eyes and mind of the customer. Who is the book for and what do we want them to see? Again I say, simple is better.
After all, the cover of the book is a promise to the reader. We should create our title and design our cover with that in mind. The person who buys the book has an absolute right to find content which meets the promise of the cover. Anything less is a betrayal and self defeating in the long haul.
In addition to the cover, some books will have internal graphics and/or photographs. For the cover, or for the inside graphics, the tools and methods we use will be the same. Whenever graphics are required, the first step will be to convert them to electronic files. This is usually done with a device called a scanner (essay number 14) which is connected to a computer. There is special software to operate the scanner. There are some simple calculations for establishing the correct scanning resolution to insure good copy from the printing press. It's about converting dots per inch from a scanner to lines per inch for a printing press.
All of this work is in the domain of graphics. Hence we use graphics software to do the actual work. The particular programs we use at Wesoomi Publishing are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a drawing program and, of course, Photoshop is a photo manipulation program.
Once the graphics become electronic files, we will use our computer programs to enhance them in various ways. We want to make them complement our books goals and we want to make sure that we meet the requirements of the printing machinery. In many cases we will have to create separate files for each color. This is because of the way printing presses work.
There have been volumes written about these color concepts and processes, but we need not get lost in the jungle. The basic idea is that a printing press creates all of the colors you see on a page from just four basic colors. The color model used in printing is the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, black (CMYK) model. This is different than the model used in your monitor and television, which is the Red, Green, Blue (RGB) model.
For the printing press to print a colored page, it must print the same page four separate times. One time for each of the inks required. As one ink overprints the previous ink we get the combination color of the current and previous inks. When you think about it, I'm sure you will be impressed by the kind of resolution which is required for the presses to turn out the beautiful copy that they do. I'll talk about the magical pressmen who make this happen later.
The book layout is not dependent on the cover design and can proceed in parallel. Again, there is special software to do this task. As I said in a previous essay, the software we use at Wesoomi Publishing is Adobe Pagemaker. This program is used to lay out the book and produce an output file in a special language called Postscript. Postscript is a proprietary product owned by Adobe Systems, Inc. It is a page definition language which is used almost exclusively in the publishing industry.
Our goal in layout is to make the book look good and make sense. the most important part of looking good is readability. A good book is not only pleasing to the eye, it is easy on the eyes. In most cases, that means black printing on white or near white paper. It also means using a font which is easily readable. By font, we mean the type we use. We have come a long way from Pica and Elite.
Although there are thousands of type faces available, many of them are simply unsuitable for general use. The four type characteristics we need to consider in creating a book are the font, size, spacing, and style. I tend to use fonts which are quite simple. That is, the characters will be distinct, one from the other. For example, a "Q" will not be mistaken for an "O". The size of the font has to do with the dimensions. My reader should not need to have 20/20 vision to read my books. Even an old person like me should have no trouble. I like to use nothing smaller than 10 point. Depending of the font I use, I may use a larger point size.
Spacing of characters will be a reflection of the font we choose. The font you are reading here is probably Arial. That is what I used when I created these web pages. When you look at it, you can see that it is easily readable. It also has the advantage that most Browsers will default to Arial. That means you will see something very close to what I posted. In my books, I prefer to use Bookman for my regular text and Esprit Book for my titles and headlines. While remaining eminently readable, both fonts are a bit more elegant than Arial.
The style of a font is how we choose to present it. We can use normal, bold, or italic. We can also under line or capitalize words or characters for emphasis. One characteristic of an amateur writer is that he will strive for emphasis through these artificial gimmicks. Sometimes these things can be useful, but it is very easily overdone. This is also true of color for emphasis in text. Color belongs mostly to graphics. It can also be used to set off a lead paragraph or sidebar in a magazine. For everything else it is best to avoid gimmicks and let our writing carry it's own weight.
Other considerations in book layout are the placement and size of graphics, the margins and supplemental material. For any graphic, it is imperative to have it as close to the text it illustrates as possible. Usually that means it should be on the same page. Graphic material should never be in an appendix. If it is important enough to be in the book, it should be with the text it illustrates. As to size, the graphic should be large enough to make all of the detail clear and no larger!
Margins have two functions. One is about how we want the book to look. The other is to make sure that everything we put in the book will be printed. If we get too close to the edge of a page, our body text may get trimmed away in the binding process. I have seen this effect a few times in cheap magazines. I am settling toward 1 inch at the top of a page, about 3/4 of an inch on the outside and bottom of a page, and 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch on the inside edge.
About how we want the book to look, we sometimes talk about white space. We want our reader to see something pleasing to the eye and nonthreatening. Thus, we will avoid paragraphs which fill half a page or more. The reader needs breaks to rest his eyes. There is nothing more daunting than to turn a page and see no white space; just solid text from top to bottom. Think how you react when you see that.
If you have a paragraph of half a page or more, look at it carefully. Even if the thoughts are closely linked, there is a place in the paragraph where a speaker will take a breath. More than likely, that is a natural break. We can put a carriage return there and see if it reads better. Sometimes we will need to add a word or two to smooth the flow. Another device which enhances readability in exposition is to place an extra line break between paragraphs.
Some books will have supplemental material. These can be justifiably put in an appendix to the book, in the back. I feel much differently about footnotes. There used to be a tendency to have what are called footnotes in some kinds of writing. Some writers still use this gimmick. Many which I have seen, I can only characterize as galloping footnotes. I'm sure you have seen some examples.
There are two ways of doing this, both of which are, in my opinion, wrong. First is the case where you have a page of 1/3 or less of text with 2/3 or more of a page of fine printed footnotes. The second method is to have pages of text littered with superscript 1, 2, 3 etcetera. The actual footnotes are then printed in the appendix of the book.
I feel strongly that if something is important to the work, it is and should be part of the work. It should not be in separate special paragraphs. If it is not important to the work, it is truly supplemental. In that case, it should be in an appendix and should not be specifically and directly referenced and indexed within the body of the work. If referred to at all, the reference should be general, such as, "For more details, see appendix E."
Now, I said that part of the task of layout is to make the book make sense. We don't want to confuse our reader with our layout so we follow some standard practices. Look in most any book and you will discover there are usually three parts to it. The front of the book will contain title pages, perhaps a table of contents, a copyright page with disclaimers and an international standard book number (ISBN). Sometimes there will be a library of congress number. There can also be a blurb about the author. This first part could also contain a foreword about the book. If there are salutary quotes from reviews, they will go in the very front of the book.
How we get reviewer's quotes before we have a book is a good question. We can do this by making proof copies for newspaper and magazine reviewers from a preliminary layout. We can also send the raw word processor output to reviewers. Another way is too actually go far enough in the manufacturing process to produce blueline copies. I'll talk about this process later.
The center of the book is the actual work of the author. This is laid out in chapters, pieces or sections as the form of the book dictates. As we said, the layout consists of making the book look nice and make sense. For example, graphics must be placed with the words they complement or emphasize. Chapter headings must be clear and stand out. Chapters usually start on new pages, preferably the right hand page. Sometimes pages may be left blank just to make this happen.
The third section of the book, if it exists, may contain advertising, references, and an index. It can also contain appendices of supplemental material. Sometimes there is nothing to justify a third section so we skip it. About advertising, a wise publisher will keep it very low key and reasonably useful. Usually an order blank for additional copies of the book and the addresses of the firm and it's website. Multiple pages of advertising are not only inappropriate, they are usually self defeating. A reader can be easily alienated if he finds that a significant part of the book he paid money for is advertising, especially if it is advertising for unrelated products.
Finally, when we think we have the layout right, a Postscript file is created and a proof copy of the book is printed on a desktop printer. If we are going to get a surprise, we want it now. We don't want to be surprised after the printing plates or negatives are made. That's a very expensive surprise.
When we are satisfied with the proof copy, we are ready to manufacture the book. This is where it starts to get expensive. Most publishers do not manufacture books. This step is done for the publisher by companies which specialize in printing and binding. There are many of these companies scattered about the country.
Next time I will discuss the book manufacturing process.
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