There are many steps between initial idea and final publication of a book.
Most steps can be described in a few short words, but take from several hours to uncountable spans of time to complete.
One of those steps is converting the designed book into an e-Book format (a professional via my publisher does that), then testing that file to ensure that all converted properly.
Over the last few days, I’ve gone page-by-page through the Kindle version. This is a complicated book, so it took extra care to test.
While it was extremely fun and exciting to see the “book as a book” when the printer’s pre-press proof arrived about a month ago, that wasn’t a full-quality print. It was produced on a lower-quality press with lower-quality paper, and as a result the images were a bit fuzzy and it wasn’t the crisp product that will ship soon from the press in Illinois.
The e-Book version, however, looks exactly like the finished product, and it is gorgeous.
For now, here is a sneak-peek at one of the two-page spreads that opens one of the sections.
In The Beautiful Snow, I used sidetracks to pull in extra information about a topic, since that book was deeply immersed in the railroads, and sidetracks are where extra cars are placed within a rail yard.
I used similar wordplay for We Suffered Much. Since the base reason the men were on this odyssey was a surveying project, I used surveying terms. Instead of sidetracks, that extra information is set out as tangents. And instead of chapters, they are called sections.
The talented book designer determined that each section would begin with a two-page spread. And each is anchored by a photograph that I took at a location featured in the section, at the proper time of year. The section title, time span, and summary sit upon the photo.
It was fun (and sometimes difficult) to go through the hundreds of photos I’d taken and select just one to serve this important purpose!
Added bonus – you can look at the fore-edge of the book (the raw edge of the pages, opposite the spine) and see where each section begins, as the photographs bleed to the edge of the page.
The books hit the warehouse in less than a month. A week or two after that, the Kindle file will be available!