Writing the Book, Part Four

This is my second post in the Guild of One-Name Studies 2020 Blog challenge.

In the previous post, I discussed the process of writing the text for The Descendants of Isaac Casbon in America. Today I’ll talk about three important steps needed to get the text ready for printing. These are use of illustrations, editing, and layout. These steps don’t necessarily fall into chronological order. In fact, they were ongoing throughout much of the writing process.

Illustrations. These are not strictly required for traditional family history books, but they certainly make them more appealing. I knew from the start that I wanted to use illustrations in the book. Over the years, several Casbon relatives have shared family photos with me, so I had a good selection to choose from. When I started writing the book, I created an “Illustrations” folder on my computer to store photos that I thought I might use. As I wrote the text in Microsoft Word, I inserted the photos at appropriate points and wrote captions for them.

Photographs weren’t the only type of illustrations. I also wanted to use maps to illustrate important places in the family history, notably Cambridgeshire (England), Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. I found good examples of period maps on public-domain websites. Then I did some additional editing, such as shading or highlighting certain areas of the maps to show where the Casbon ancestors lived. I created nested maps that allow the reader to “zoom in” to see certain areas in more detail. Here is an example of one.

Other illustrations included a chart of Isaac Casbon’s ancestors, images from parish registers, censuses, and other online document collections, excerpts from newspapers,
a handwritten family history, and pages from a family Bible.

Most of the images needed some kind of modification before they were ready to insert into the book. For printed books, a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi) or higher is recommended. Most of my images were lower resolution—some as low as 72 dpi. Although this resolution looks fine on a computer screen, it isn’t detailed enough for a print publication. I won’t go into details, but I was able to use image-enhancement software to increase the resolution of my pictures. I also used the software to adjust the lighting and contrast, to sharpen the images, and to crop them. Most of the photographs were originally printed in black and white or sepia-toned. Color photographs would have greatly increased the cost of the book, so I converted all the images to greyscale.

Editing. I was blessed with a “secret weapon.” My daughter worked as a copy editor for a New York publishing company for several years. She graciously accepted my request for her to review my text. She happened to be on maternity leave during the time that I needed her skills. Although taking care of a newborn child was her first priority, she managed to keep up with my writing.

I usually sent her one or two completed chapters at a time by email. She returned them to me with comments which we then discussed over the phone. Even though I had carefully proofread what I had written, she invariably found errors and made helpful suggestions on ways to improve the text for readability. We had good discussions about the finer points of grammar, such as use of commas and when to spell out numerals.

For those who don’t have an editor in the family, I strongly suggest finding someone with a good grasp of grammar and composition to edit your text for you. It’s important to have another set of eyes read what you’ve written, not only to find typos and grammatical errors, but to make sure your target audience will understand what you are trying to say with your words.

Layout. This is the process of placing all the elements of the book—text, illustrations, headings, page numbers, etc.—into the final form needed to make it print-ready. Up to this point in my life, the only experience I had in publishing was some professional correspondence and my annual Christmas letter. I had a lot to learn!

The first step in layout was deciding what size I wanted the finished book to be. This is known as the trim size of the book. I decided upon a trim size of 6 by 9 inches—the most common size for paperback books in the United States. Based on this I changed the page size in Microsoft Word to 6 by 9 inches. I also set the margins, leaving room for a header on top, page numbers on the bottom, and a gutter. The gutter is the additional space added to the inside page margin to account for the binding. The page layout was set for mirror margins so that the outside and inside margins would match on odd and
even pages.

I learned that chapters should always begin on odd-numbered pages. This means that an extra blank page must sometimes be inserted at the end of a chapter so the next one can begin on an odd number. I set up headers so that the book’s title would appear on even-numbered and the chapter title on odd-numbered pages. I set footers so the page numbers would be placed at the outside bottom margin of each page. I found headers and footers to be very frustrating. They seemed to keep moving to places I didn’t want them or disappearing from places I did want them. It took a lot of time, trial and error to get
them right.

Once the page size and margins were set, it was time to fill the pages with my text and illustrations. Of course this required a number of decisions as well: typeface, or font (Times New Roman), type size (16-pitch for chapter headings, 12-pitch for body text, 11-pitch for child lists, 10-pitch for bibliography and index, 9-pitch for captions and endnotes), use of small caps for names, line spacing, justification, and placement of headings. I didn’t find many rules for these decisions, so I looked at a lot of examples and made my best guess.

Another aspect of layout is making sure your pages don’t break at undesirable places. For example, you don’t want your reader to have to turn the page to read the last word or two of a paragraph (a “widow”). Likewise, a single line of a new paragraph or section should not fall at the bottom of a page (an “orphan”).

Placement of illustrations greatly complicates the layout process, You have to decide where to place them and what size they should be. They should be in close proximity to the relevant text so your readers don’t have to flip pages trying to find them. Microsoft Word isn’t an ideal program for illustrations and it takes quite a bit of fine-tuning to adjust spacing and how words and paragraphs flow around pictures.

One other aspect of layout is the creation and placement of the front- and back-matter of the book. Front-matter is everything that goes before the main text of the book: half title page, title page, copyright page, dedication, preface, etc. Front matter is numbered with small roman numerals, beginning with the half-title page. However, these page numbers are not printed until the table of contents, which was page vii in my book.

The back matter is everything that comes after the main text. In my book, these included the Notes, Bibliography, Index, and About the Author.

Obviously layout is complicated and makes the difference between having a professional versus home-made appearance to the book. Many people pay professionals to help with this part of self-publishing for good reason.

At this point in the process, other than proofreading a few more times, the book was ready to publish. Stay tuned for the next and final post in this series!