A book excerpt

[chipotle]

Since one person asked and a couple others might be interested, this is what the layout for the book looks like now, in a PDF of pages 3-9 (which includes the table of contents and the first three pages of the title story).

Coyotes Howl Excerpt

Comments

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

Very very nice, Watts! Lovely job of layout!

I'm terrible at layout and enjoy seeing good design work.

[aureth.livejournal.com]

I am greatly looking forward to buying this.

[starkaudio.livejournal.com]

Yeah...put me down for one. Looks good! Makes me want to eat at Chili's. (*Ducking*)

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

Fourth'ed. S'a very nice layout indeed, and I'm betting it'll sell like hotcakes come the con.

-Traveller.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, tall skinny book, neat. Where did you get the little symbols (colophons?) from?

I wish I could see more of the pages, so I could get an idea of what the program's doing with the leading and such... the two facing pages here seem to be too ideal to make that determination. All the lines line up. Is there supposed to be a smaller margin nearer the binding? Or is the PDF not showing the part of the page which will be lost inside the binding?

The layout feels good.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The ornaments are all actually glyphs in the typeface that I'm using (Chaparral). It's a very cool typeface, really--sort of a modern take on Southwestern influence, but subtle enough to be a body face rather than a decorative one.

Yes, the margin on the binding side is a little smaller; it's a slightly more traditional approach to a text block size than you often see now. It'll be even smaller when it's bound, although looking at other Sofawolf books I doubt it'll lose more than a quarter of an inch (it's actually 3.5 picas, a little over a half an inch).

The lines on all the facing pages line up, because of my previously mentioned manual page balancing by adding/subtracting lines from each spread. The ending point varies from spread to spread (although as little as possible), but not between two facing pages.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

So you went ahead and did it all by hand? I should be disturbed by that but I can be just as obsessive. :)

I'll have to see how the tighter inner margin looks when it's actually bound.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

Very nice! :)