Here we are again (late!) with the February 2020 edition of Peschel Press’s monthly newsletter. I’ll always be late.
I’ll start with Robert Burns: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Ours have too, but no worries. They haven’t gone awry by too much.
I expected to announce the publication of The Complete Annotated Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie and Bill Peschel, but no. Bill is still slaving away on that book.
Instead, we focused on getting The White Elephant of Panschin https://amzn.to/2uo4IkA published. It, unlike Murder on the Links, has a hard deadline. I have to have copies in hand when I participate in Love is in the Air at Ashcombe Greenhouses and Nurseries in Mechanicsburg on Saturday, 15 February 2020. Here’s the link for the event. This place is gorgeous and worth a visit any time of the year and not just for this Valentine’s themed romance writing event. They’ve got everything, right down to the café if you feel the need for a nibble while surrounded by flowers.
I’m going to pull back the curtain and reveal a little bit about how the sausage is made and how tiny publishers like us have to scramble with our staff of two.
I really wanted copies of The White Elephant of Panschin on hand. Several people at the 2019 event were gracious enough to buy copies of The Bride from Dairapaska. I wanted to have the sequel available and, thanks to Bill slaving away non-stop (and me too), we do! After I wrote last month’s newsletter, we discussed what really needed to be done next. We often have those long boring talks about our relationship and this was one of them.
As a result, Bill set everything else aside and plunged into editing some 250,000 words in three weeks. Every day, he gave me the chapters he’d finished and I went through the manuscript once more, with feeling.
The reason? We had a second, earlier drop-dead date. We use print-on-demand for our physical copies. We had to meet their deadline for printing and then shipping the books. We always have to allow two full weeks to get the lowest shipping cost. Normally, we get the books in less time. Sometimes, we get our order within five days. But I can’t guarantee that will happen. Our profit margins are nonexistent so I can’t afford to pay for rush shipment. Thus, I have to assume two weeks even when it rarely takes that long. I can promise you the very first time you assume your print-on-demand service will ship your books within five days like they usually do, they’ll take the full two weeks and you’ll be left standing behind your table at the venue with no books.
We also had to allow time (which I did not understand but I do now) for our wonderful, glorious cover artist, Jake Caleb, to supply us with the finished cover. But didn’t I buy that cover last year? I did indeed. Here’s another bit of publishing minutia. The cover design is finished. The cover size is not, because Jake didn’t know how thick a book I would write and he didn’t know how many pages we would use for the trade paperback. Once Bill had White Elephant formatted, he knew how many pages it used. Then he could tell Jake and Jake provided us with the right size spine (it’s 1.5 inches, for you completists).
It’s a big book (626 pages). See for yourself (Amazon Universal Link). It goes to BKLNK, which figures out where you are and sends you to the Amazon page in your country. Its an affiliate link, so we get a few coins at no charge to you!
Never let it be said I don’t give value for money.
That’s another hidden deadline because Jake has other clients and can’t leap to our little projects whenever we summon him.
Here’s another hidden deadline. We always make trade paperback editions of our books prior to the ebooks. When Bill lays out the trade paperback, it gives us another chance to catch typos and errors. Because the format is different, an error often leaps off the page, an error that the previous ten passes missed. Yes, we do go through a manuscript multiple times and we still miss stuff.
We like fancy books and laying out a fancy book takes more time than running the manuscript through an ebook program and pressing “publish.” There’s applying for copyright, writing cover blurbs, author bio and acknowledgements; all have to be ready. Peschel Press goes above and beyond those mundane details and if you’ve seen one of our print books, you know we get really fancy.
All our books come with a built-in bookplate. For much of the line, we use a vintage piece of art:
For The Steppes of Mars series, I’ve been creating a unique piece of art for each title. Here’s the bookplate for The Bride from Dairapaska:
Naturally, I needed something new for The White Elephant of Panschin. Since the action takes place inside the Domes of Panschin, I wanted to give an idea of what the domes look like from the outside:
The Domes of Panschin are a unique environment on my Mars. They provide some of the last habitat for terraformers to grow unchecked by the improved atmosphere outside the domes on the rest of Mars. They run rampant within the domes, caking every possible surface that receives light with a huge variety of algae, fungi, moss, etc. They escaped into the pages of the book; into the footers, the chapter headings, the fleurons, even blanketing the dropcaps at the start of each chapter.
Bill discovered a terrific font (Jokerman) to use for the dropcaps (those are the larger, fancier first letter at the start of a chapter). The letters look like they’ve got fungi growing on them, making them perfect for the book:
Another creative touch was adding images of the interior of a dome to the ends of chapters, wherever there was space. Most of this fancy work won’t appear in the ebook edition. All the words will remain the same but ebooks don’t allow for the extensive art that print does. Ebooks have their strengths, but creative and fanciful design flourishes aren’t one of them.
When the trade paperback was laid out, uploaded, and accepted, then Bill moved on to format the ebook version. He’ll find more errors during the formatting and add them to the punch list for the second trade paperback edition of the book.
All of this takes time. Bill really rose to the occasion and produced a beautiful book. I still haven’t seen it as of this writing. Our copies are supposed to arrive tomorrow. By the time you read this newsletter, I’ll be looking over the finished book, looking for and finding another set of typos, the ones that Bill didn’t find when formatting the manuscript into the ebook. They’ll go on the correction punch list too.
So there you are: a little information about how the heap of words gets transformed into a finished book. I loved writing The White Elephant of Panschin and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
Thanks for subscribing and see you next month!