Chin Music Press - Adventures in Publishing

Designing DYK: part 7

We've finalized the cover but have yet to finalize the materials. Bang was supposed to get a nice box of samples out to me here in Tokyo a week ago but it didn't arrive until Saturday afternoon. Not that we haven't been busy with a million other things in the meantime (like eating French food) but, we'd really like to get our final estimate for the book, which is very much contingent on what materials we use.

So here we are, a week before the final pdfs are due at the printers, and we still don't know *exactly* how much the book is going to cost to produce. We have a pretty good idea but no exact figure.

Originally we were going to use a type of paper called Rainbow, which despite its name, actually comes in solid colors. So a Rainbow with a nice linen embossing. Or at least, that's what we thought until the samples arrived on Saturday. Rainbow looks and feels cheap. Maybe it's nice for the cover of a book you're hiding under a dust-jacket but us Chin Music folk — lovers of naked, dust-jacket-less books — were a bit turned off by its nasty, dry feel.

Thankfully our point-man at Bang sent over some other samples for a material called Kivar which is worlds above Rainbow in terms of presence and quality. Think of it as the stuff you'd bind a bible in. Also think of it as the stuff that could potentially drain your bank account.

For me it's Monday, but for the folk in Minnesota, it's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Rome time, which means we're still about a day away from getting a final quote. Will Bruce have to sell his blood and/or liver to pay for the cover? Oh, who said publishing isn't exciting?

But the book is basically all laid out. That is to say, I spent the later part of last week and most of the weekend feeding text into Indesign, tweaking things here and there, and trying to maintain a consistent typographic feel throughout the variety of pieces in Do You Know.

I printed the whole thing out last night, and on the agenda for this afternoon and evening is the following to-do list:

cheap Italian lunch in Mejiro
board myself up in cafe Zoka (yes, the same Zoka as in Seattle!) to space-time-bind myself with the editing process going on across the ocean
letter to Bang and Bruce outlining final cover and endpaper specs
one page PDF of the cover for our distribution sales conference — the point of this being to excite our salesmen down south to hawk Do You Know to all the places that turned down Kuhaku
PDF galleys for the writers so they can sign off on final checks
Start scanning and checking the second half of the book in printout form for typographical inconsistencies
think about where and how the engravings would best interplay with the rhythm of the stories
figure out which stories will be connected with our little introduction map of the city
layout the alternative (What? You'll see.) Table of Contents

Only one week left and a lot to do! More later ...

Craig Mod >> November 21, 2005

Comments

I lied! I ended up having Indian food -- stuffing my face with fresh baked Nan -- at Malabar. The Italian place makes a wonderful Penne Arabiato but man are those portions small. And they want an extra ¥300 to give you extra pasta -- ¥300?! Are you mad?! That's almost half the price of the whole lunch. Ohhh, little Italian place in Mejiro. I love you but you're serving food for small boned women who shop for a living.

I am at Zaka right now. I hijacked some wifi connection called "Mejiro Seikei" which sort of translates to Mejiro Design. All I know is if you sit in the far table on the second floor of Zaka you can just about grab the connection.

Okay, back to work!

Craig Mod at November 21, 2005 12:02 AM