We have been dying to release Volume IX, and it’s finally here!
Well, at least our proof is. Our full shipment will arrive in two weeks, but you can pre-order the journal now. Isn’t our cover for this volume absolutely beautiful?! The photo is courtesy of Guilherme Bergamini, and we think he did a fantastic job with this photograph.
So, with that, how do we make our collection of works into a book? In other words, how do we format the journal?
It’s a loaded question. We already have every piece ordered and in place in a highly organized stack of shuffled poems and prose pieces, but now we have to figure out how to put them into Adobe InDesign and figure out all the inner workings of that. For someone who only just learned the basics (that’s me, Alyssa), it was an experience in itself.
This part is easy and also the most difficult, simply because there is little margin for error. We already have the book design that Eva Huebner came up with last year, but we still need to copy each work in manually and readjust as necessary. Every author’s name and work needs to be checked, checked again by each author, and then checked four more times by a third party.
Here is where the editorial staff sends out PDFs of each contributor’s work as seen in the journal to have it verified. Most of the time, the proof looks good, but spacing sometimes gets funky. The authors know their works better than we do, so we are notified of a desired change and are able to change it before press time.
Then, after all is approved, we purchase a proof copy from our publisher to read through and verify that spacings, margins, and typography all looks good. This takes about two weeks on average, but can take up to a month if file formats are not all correctly submitted. (Again, new to InDesign…)
Finally, the day arrives when we receive the proof. One of our editors almost cried when the book was revealed, and that reaction is pretty typical. Not just because the cover is that stunning, but because the cover also represents all of the migraines, hand cramps, and puzzled looks that went into creating this incredible collection of works.
We hope you enjoy it just as much as we do. Let us know what you think of the cover in the comments!
Take care.