Designs and Decisions

As I’ve worked on the narrative and preliminary sketches for my new book, “I Wanted to Ask My Dad”, I’ve prayed about who I could ask to help with editing the book’s design. 

Design editing is an incredibly important job as it takes someone with the technical skills to convert my artwork into a book-design format and who appreciates and understands the concept I am hoping to convey.   

As God would have it, I was recently connected to the wife of one of my husband’s business partners.  Dee has an editing and publishing business on the West Coast and agreed to review my narrative.  Not only did she love the concept and the writing, she agreed to be my new book’s Design Editor. 

One of Dee’s first questions was how I imagined the book’s format: Did I want this book formatted with a laminated cover and spiral binding, like my ABC book?  Or did I want to make this new book a hardbound?  Could my long-time printer in South Bend help make this hardbound if this was the route I wanted to go?  Printing a hardbound book is expensive; would I have the audience for this endeavor?  How would I pay for the upfront costs of printing in this format?

I posed the “hardbound” question to Katie, who has encouraged me in this endeavor since before its inception.  Katie has been enormously helpful in reading, editing and giving me feedback on my book’s narrative and has given me ideas for some of the sketches.  In response to the question of whether I should print this book as a hardbound, Katie immediately declared, “Hardbound.  This is a solid book.   A solid book deserves a solid cover.”

Others, including two librarians and a bookstore owner have also urged me to publish “I Wanted to Ask My Dad” as a hardbound.  Hardbound books, they explained are not only more durable, they are easier to catalog and shelve.  Then, two week ago, I learned my printer is able to help me print this as a hardbound once I am ready.  So, it seems the path is leading to a hardbound.  Once I am ready.

Which gets me back to my sketching; I am about halfway through the preliminary sketches for the narrative, so I still have a little ways to go before I am ready to send Dee my finished artwork.   That’s when I’ll need to think about the financing for printing a hardbound edition of “I Wanted to Ask My Dad”. 

In the meantime, I’ll stay focused on adding to the sketches laid out on my drafting table.  That’s all I can do for now.  As I’ve repeatedly seen throughout the development of this book, God knows what needs to happen to keep this moving along, so I’ll just work and rest right there.