July 22, 2018

Ablation Cascade is available as a paperback. I hadn't planned to release it as a paperback, but Amazon has a contest for new works. To enter, you have to publish your book as both an e-book and a paperback, so that was good incentive. Kindle paperbacks are printed on demand, meaning a laser printer on steroids hammers out each one after it's been ordered. Thank goodness I didn't have to print up ten thousand advance copies in a massive print run. Where would I put them?

Seeing the results, I'm glad that I made the effort. I still prefer the e-book format because of its portability and its display options, such as the ability to enlarge the font size, something you appreciate more with age. When I was working on the manuscript, I'd transfer the draft e-book to various devices so that I could read it in different typefaces and font sizes. Each visual framing gave me a fresh perspective on the words themselves, nudging me out of my editorial complacency. I'm all in favor of technologies that help people gain access to books. Newer Kindles include the OpenDyslexic typeface, which is an aid for many people. There's also the text-to-speech application on some tablets, a benefit to those who have impaired vision.

Many people prefer books on paper, of course, and there is certainly a satisfaction that comes from holding your own work in your hands. When designing the pages, I had to put aside Einsteinian relative thinking and embrace a Newtonian universe of absolute layout. I've put together PDF books before, so I knew about gutters and bleeds. (Rather gruesome terminology, don't you think?) I'd never produced a cover, however. Amazon publishes guidelines for this, and the main trick is figuring out how wide to make the spine based on the page count and paper choice. Netra Nei did all the hard work with the cover anyway.

The e-book contains full-color illustrations by Chris Uhruh. Kindle Direct Publishing can print in color, and I was curious if that option would be less expensive than I'd imagined. When I uploaded the manuscript, I learned that I'd have to charge $40 a copy! That wasn't because of any profit I'd be making. So I "desaturated" the images into black-and-white, which allows me to price the paperback reasonably. Technically, the illustrations are "grayscale," though the thought of touching greyscale might horrify devotees of Game of Thrones.

April 14, 2018

Folk wisdom says not to judge a book by its cover. Oscar Wilde wrote, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." Sounds like a standoff between a sober granny and a wicked uncle. Best to err on the side of caution and give a book a decent skin.

The prevailing e-book wisdom says that a cover has to be catchy at a thumbnail size as the reader scrolls along in an online bookstore. That's some good advice. For Ablation Cascade, I worked with Seattle-based graphic designer Netra Nei, who also developed my company logo.

I didn't know exactly what I wanted for the cover design at first, but I knew I wanted the look to be flat, bold, and colorful. As Netra and I discussed ideas, we decided that the design should look less like a hardcover book jacket and more like a movie poster along the minimalist lines of Saul Bass, who designed some of the best movie posters ever.

I like hand-drawn fonts and some creative messing around with the lettering to give character to the title itself, something one finds in the Saul Bass posters. In the end, though, Netra and I decided to go with a clean, unmonkeyed-with font, even if that might cause sleepless nights for Ryan Gosling.

Our thinking was that the title Ablation Cascade was difficult enough for people to comprehend at first. Almost everyone has to read the title twice to make sure they've read it right. "Cool title," I'd hear, "but what's an ablation?" It's not a word you hear every day. I define it as the loss of a part through annihilation. Merriam-Webster says this.