Category Archives: Bookbuilding

These posts relate to technical discoveries and other information about how I am making my books.

Jacket text for “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”

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I am working through a series of exercises with Jackie on planning Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!. Step 4 involves writing ‘jacket text’ for the story. This is the text that might appear on the back of the book, or on the front flap of a dust jacket. It’s a kind of marketing text intended to draw the readers interest.

So for, I’ve come up with this:

A hidden society of supremacists is trying to take over the world. They are outnumbered by the rest of us, yet they believe that their strength, intelligence, weaponry, and general cuteness give them the right to rule us all.  Yes, cuteness… for these supremacists are rabbits.

Years ago, Tom Johnson and his parents had fled the rabbits’ captivity to build a new life on the outside. Tom’s father had gone back in later to rescue other humans from the rabbits’ totalitarian nightmare… and never returned.

Now, Tom was in high school. But his earliest memories were of the safe predictable environment that the rabbits provided for their human guests. He remembered the rabbits’ soft fur and cute little voices, and their warmth and love… and he looked around at the harsh world of high school, the bullying and endless struggle, and he knew he had to leave.

First attempt at a cover for The Lonely Little Fridge!

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Pen-and-ink artwork before colouring with watercolours. Complete with ink blotches!

This is my first attempt at laying out the cover for The Lonely Little Fridge. The artwork is india ink over pencil sketches on paper.

Because the artwork was largeish (2 panels 8.5 inches square, plus a 0.25-inch spine between), I scanned it in five pieces using VueScan. Then I opened all the pieces in Photoshop and assembled them into one image there. Because the linework is so sparse, Photoshop’s auto-align function didn’t have enough to work with, so I aligned by hand and used the auto-blend function to smooth things out. Then I used Levels to expand the dynamic range, smashing light greys toward white and dark greys toward black.

IngramSpark provides templates for each size and type of cover they offer. This cover will be case-bound, with a page trim size of 8.5 inches square. One of the templates is an InDesign file, so I built the cover on it, inserting the artwork and text on layers between the ISBN layer and the layer with guides and printed info.

Once I get the artwork coloured (via Viviva watercolours), I will scan it again and do this all over again!

Legal Deposit

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When publishing a book in Canada, it is an actual legal requirement to send a copy or two to the national library for their collection.

This applies to printed books, ebooks, serial publications, video and audio recordings, maps, microforms, even sheet music.

The materials go into the national library, and one copy is made available for the public, while the other goes into The Archives.

More from Library and Archives Canada.

Preparing to print a hardcover

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The Lonely Little Fridge is going to be a hardcover and a fixed-format ebook.

Amazon print-on-demand does not print hardcovers, so I set up an account at IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com/), the publishing platform, who does print hardcovers. They also handle distribution worldwide; bookstores order from them.

In order to print with them, we have to provides all sorts of information, in addition to the actual book files.

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Languages, Languages

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I am hoping to get my books translated into as many languages as possible.

I’m starting with the smaller ones, with The Lonely Little Fridge to be specific. The actual word count of The Lonely Little Fridge is only around 700, so it should be relatively easy and inexpensive to have it translated.

I’m going to translate it into Esperanto and hopefully have someone else check it. I would very much like it to be translated into French.

I’d also like it to be translated into Indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut (with the syllabic writing). or Kanien’kéha (known to English-speakers as Mohawk) or Anishinaabemowin (known to English-speakers as Ojibwe).

Alas, no exhibiting at online TCAF… this year.

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However, I got a great message back from them with some useful advice:

For those who are interested in applying for TCAF in the future, we want to take a moment to provide some context for what our committee considers when selecting applicants for TCAF:

TCAF exhibitors should have a substantial body of comics in print. We are a comics focused show, which means that we try to prioritize exhibitors who have lots of comics for sale.

TCAF exhibitors are encouraged to debut new work at the festival. New comics and new books help make TCAF exciting for patrons, and tend to ensure more successful and profitable shows for exhibitors. It’s great to see applicants who have a solid idea of a new comics project, especially one that has a clear and confident plan for completion.

It’s important to note that these aren’t “the rules” for applying to TCAF, and many other factors are taken into consideration, but we hope this helps with your future TCAF applications.

TCAF

So I’m going to finish “Little Lost Part” as if I were exhibiting it at TCAF, and keep going from there!

It came!

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It came! Nineteen Tales of COVID-19, the compilation I submitted a story to! ? (I changed the pictures when I realized how many crumbs were on the kitchen table… now it’s in front of my computer.)

The compilation was organized by the awesome Jackie Brown of Jackie Brown Books. The writers all have some connection to Durham Region (for example, I grew up in Whitby).

Yes, I also designed the cover and laid the interior out.

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Back and Forth Between Scrivener and InDesign

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The Beginning of a Long Journey

Jackie introduced me to Scrivener, a writing program. I wrote a draft script for Parts in it, using the Comic Script template provided with the program, and tips from its author Antony Johnston.

This format gave me automatically-incrementing page and scene numbers, which are adjusted on output. There were paragraph formats for character names, dialogue, narration, and more. It was a lot like the well-known screenwriting program Final Draft.

Final Draft itself is of course one of the well-known programs for screenwriting. It allows the writer to manage characters and plot points and make sure that all the loose ends are tied up. I believe that there is a detailed script output goes so far as to tabulate what characters (and therefore actors) and locations and even important props are in each scene (clearly useful in panning the shooting of a movie).

I have found that graphic-novel scripts are a lot more like screenplays than regular prose novels, and I tend to think more in pictures than text when creating story. I considered using Final Draft for my script, but decided to try Scrivener, as I found that Scrivener was a considerably lighter program, aimed more for writing.

However, Scrivener (and Final Draft) are text only. Parts is going to be a graphic novel. I decided to lay it out in Adobe InDesign, which I had used before. In InDesign I can design pages, choosing page size, margins, fonts, and so on. Then I cam import and place artwork. InDesign is much more flexible than Scrivener in the way that it can size and arrange artwork on a page. It places images and text in “frames”, which can themselves have different shapes and outlines. I immediately thought of dialogue boxes and word balloons in comics.

Ideally, I would like to write the script in Scrivener (or Final Draft for that matter), and export it in such a way that the structural information of the script is preserved. It would include not just a piece of text, but some record that the text was a piece of dialogue spoken by Character X.

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