The Design Process: What You Provide
Ideas and Aspirations for Your Book
Tell us all the pertinent details of how you imagine your book to be in it's final, market-ready form. Via email and/or phone conversations, we'll discuss your book so that we reach a deep understanding of your book and how best to present it to attact your intended audience.
A Finished Manuscript
This can be provided to us as an attachment in an email, or mailed to us as a compact disc or flash drive. We can work with most text formats including any version of Microsoft Word, Open Office, Word Perfect, RTF (rich-text format) or plain text.
We encourage you to truly polish your manuscript before submitting it to us. This includes a thorough editing and proofing process. There's nothing quite so discouraging for an author as publishing a book with type and grammatical mistakes. If you'd like us to recommend an editor/proof reader, please click here.
Even with the best editing of a manuscript some overlooked errors surface when transformed into a finished book format. We are happy to make those corrections (1 hour included per 100 pages), and will work with you to make your book error free. If the corrections are extensive we're still happy to make corrections but may have to charge an hourly fee ($50 per hour) in addition to our quote. You can submit your corrections as a list (with details like page, paragraph and sentence number, and a description of the change), or as a marked-up PDF printout or book proof. This may take several rounds, but we keep working it until you're 100% happy.
After we've designed your book and provide you with a proof we encourage you to carefully review it and even let your editor/proofer (if you have one) have one more look at it.
* Text formatting: If you use "Styles" to format your text we can incorporate those styles when we import your text into our design software (Adobe InDesign). If you're not familiar with "Styles" don't worry about it, they are not necessary, but if you'd like to find out what they're about here's an article and a video that explains what they are and how you can utilize them.
Images
Please don't let any of the technical terms below intimidate you. Whatever your level of experience with image formatting we can help guide you every step of the way or, if you request it, we'll do it for you.
If you are providing images to be included in your book they should be provided in a "tif" or "psd" file format and should be at least 300dpi (dots per inch) for the size that they will be featured in your book. If you're not sure about the technical details of your files we can help you and even reformat and enhance them for publication for an additional set (negotiated) or hourly fee.
Black-and-white book interiors should format all images as "grayscale" for images with graduations. Black and white line drawings should be in a "bitmap" format and be at least 1200dpi. For a color interior and cover images should be CMYK color. As mentioned earlier, if any of this confuses you don't worry, we'll help guide you through it and even take care of the conversions to proper formatting if you request it.
Image Captions
If your images require captions, please provide a separate text document with the text for each caption. An efficient way to organize your images with captions is to number each image in it's file name in the order they are to appear in your book and use a corresponding number in the text document. Providing us with descriptions in regards to image placement within the story is also very helpful.
Footnotes/End Notes
Please provide footnotes as a separate document with a description of which chapters they belong in. End notes can be included in the main-text document and should not be in a separate document.
If any of the above is unclear, no worries, lets talk and we'll walk you through the process.