A book is coming. In Fact, technically it already exists as a physical object, although somehow in a twist of fate, out of the various people actively involved in the project, I am the only one who has not seen a copy yet. Some have gone to the publishers to be issued to the UK copyright libraries, others have gone to the marketing company and our copies were delivered to my parents as they had the advantage of being in! I will see them soon, but let’s go back to how we got here first.

The last couple of months have been a bit of blur for me, so I shall spare myself and you an attempt at piecing together an exact timeline of what happened, but here is what did.

Having submitted my edited and proofed manuscript we set about the fun task of getting the book typeset and designed. I had been already talking to artists about an illustration for the cover, and having been given a helpful steer by my godmother I was put in contact with Rose Hutchings who after a telephone discussion agreed to do it. This was an interesting process for me as I had some compositional ideas about what I wanted to feature, but I had not considered anything like the emotional tone. After our discussion, and having been sent a copy of my redrafted manuscript, Rose produced a number of sketches for me and with a certain amount of canvassing of other people to check my opinions, I selected the one that would become our cover. Rose continued to work things up for me, tweaking near the end until I had the illustration that you see below:

If I had some ideas about how I wanted the cover to look, I was slightly taken aback to find myself momentarily without an opinion about what I wanted for the actual layout. I love books as objects, and definitely have preferences for design, but hadn’t really thought about it much for my own project. So when Catherine very reasonably asked about things like font preferences, I was only able to offer up a liking for working in Palatine Linotype, which I hardly ever bother with as the first thing I have to do when submitting a manuscript is change the font to the usually requested Times New Roman. However, once Catherine and the people from 2QT started sending me some mock-ups of various design options and fonts, then preferences quickly came to the fore. After a conference round my parents dining table with various print-outs, and me grabbing my dad’s printing eye glass, we quickly settled on a font (for the record, Palatino was the first to be thrown out so as ever, I know nothing) and eventually we were able come up with a design layout.

We also had sent the final illustration from Rose to 2QT so the ever patient Charlotte Mouncey could turn this into a book jacket. I say jacket, as not only did she have to sort the front, but come up with the rest of the design and place the text of the blurb. This was something that I had tried to draft, working on the elevator pitch I had always used and with a word limit suggested by Ben Cameron who is doing the publicity campaign for the book. However, it turns out that people who run companies that do this sort of thing professionally are really good at doing things like writing blurbs and so when Catherine sent us a draft it was obvious what we should use that, so with a couple of tweaks it was set. After a couple of emails Charlotte then nailed the design of the whole jacket and the cover looks like this:

So, just when I thought I was done with reading and checking. We got the final layout to check, and so one final read. This sent me back into another bout of editing frenzy but with a few final final edits we were done.

Things are in motion, and as I said, there are copies of my book in the world. It exists. It’s a thing. Now I just need to sell it. But people are reminding me to be proud, so for a moment I’ll allow that, in deference to Rachael, Dad, and Brooke.

It will be on to the next thing tomorrow.