Just this afternoon I got to see the proof of Tom Rath’s new book. The initial impression is good, although in the 8 1/2″ x 11″ size with few pages makes it feel like an expensive magazine. The cover that was so much trouble looks fine (except I went back one too many iterations when re-doing the background colour to fit inside the bleed boundaries and missed a text re-arrangement.
I see that I should have put more white space in the interior. While the poem text doesn’t run off the page, using a very dark font and going out to fairly narrow margins makes it seem a bit too packed. A smaller font size and wider margins would have been better.
The positive bit about the colour interior is that the colors seem nice and bright. I had purposely increased the saturation to avoid the washed-out look of a sample book, but Tom R had said the pictures looked ‘a bit flat.’ I now understand that he meant with non-glossy paper the pictures do not look like in a glossy magazine.
Anyway, Tom is an extremely reasonable client and is in a hurry to have books to sell, so we went ahead and ordered without changes (not all clients are that reasonable and some have quite impossible expectations).
Tom R showed me the proof at the writers guild meeting, and the presentation was about the Espresso Book Machine at the University of Prince Edward Island. It was fascinating to hear him quietly bemoan the amount of support time he spends with authors to get the manuscripts into a printable file format. I walked away with a sense of restored confidence that Wood Islands Prints is providing a valuable service interfacing authors to a printer.