Two-page slug spreads
My editor dropped me an email Tuesday at lunchtime with a formatted proof copy of The Naturally Bug-Free Garden
to look over. And, by the way, could I get it back to her by Wednesday
morning? That didn't give me much room to be an over-achiever, but I still managed to get my corrections back to her by 5 pm Tuesday. (Good thing it was pouring down rain and thus being outside held
little appeal.)
I've been waiting with
baited breath to see what Skyhorse would come up with for the interior
design of this book since half of the reason I signed a deal with them
in the first place was because I felt like the images deserved to be
seen in print. Of course, Skyhorse's designer made very different
decisions than I did when I first laid out the book, planning to self-publish it on paper...but
in many cases I like Skyhorse's version much better. For example, take a
look at the two-page title spreads above, my version on the top and
Skyhorse's below. I'm not ashamed to say that theirs makes mine look
homemade.
(By the way, if you're
not used to looking at files like this, ignore the white space around
the edges and the black lines on the corners. The book is set up with
"bleed," meaning that the images will go right off the edge of the page
like you'd see in a glossy magazine rather than having a white border
around them. This is fancy formatting that gave me fits when I tried to
do it myself.)
Our duckies will be
enjoying full-page billing, as will one of my favorite toads, but for
some reason Skyhorse's designer didn't opt to turn my awesome slug photo
into a two-page spread. I can't imagine why not! Don't they realize
that my readers will want to post those slugs on their walls as pin-up
models?
Interestingly, despite
having added 31% more words between formatting the manuscript for myself
and sending the file to my publisher, the page count remains the same
--- 126 pages even. I'm not sure why Amazon thinks the book will be 208
pages long, but I guess preorder pages are often based on guesswork.
Here are a few pre-order links in case you'd like to enjoy this
glossy paperback when it comes to life this spring:
I hope seeing a book slowly make its way into print is almost as interesting as my usual posting topics...like goat poop. Now isn't that memory making slug pinups look pretty good?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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