Engine Punk

The proof is here and it looks fantastic! Lightning Source have done a great job and addressed the minor quibbles I had. My rendering for the front cover is sharper than ever and the red go-faster strip is redder than I thought possible. Inside, the paper is really white and the text looks blacker than other books. It looks so vivid. Most of them seem to use a down market yellowy paper that might be made out of straw. And I think the publishers should have a quiet word with their printers for, by comparison with Lightning Source's results, I think their printers might be watering the ink. The cover for The Horsepower Whisperer looks like it's powered by batteries! Either that or I'm feeling euphoric. I haven't seen Bex yet to receive her graphic design analysis. She's probably practising for the London marathon. We're working on the cover for The Wormton Lamb and I got the first version two days with a very excited e-mail about getting excepted fo...

Initial euphoria later gave way to a more critical appraisal of the end product Here I am with my galley proof. It arrived yesterday and Becky of Redsnapper captured the moment in pixels. Overall it looks fantastic. We'll have to re-submit because some minor things aren't quite right. I've already re-jigged the text matter. Word had re-formatted a paragraph with double spacing. It's clear that I can't trust it at all. I'll have to review every page of the pdf file before I re-submit. Thanks to Beck the outside looks really good. In fact the back cover looks even better than the front, although you can't see it so you'll just have to take my word for it (but not my Microsoft Word!) However, we have a cunning plan and a revised version is already in preparation. It's just amazing to think that after months, years even, when my book wasn't even a collection of disparate files, I can now flick through its pages, sniff the glue (what ...