Cover page and all that jazz

When you start to put the actual book together, you realize that there are all of these little features in "real books" that you take for granted.  These little touches, like layout and a title page, usually fall to other people, who work for the publisher.  When self publishing, those other people just become you on a different day.

So, I recently dropped in a simple title page to our book.

You haven't seen the cover yet, but I think the title page sort of makes sense on its own and it definitely works with the illustrations within the book.

I'm no artist, I couldn't afford one and I wasn't going to impose upon my friends for this project.  Keeping that in mind, I wanted to do something simple.  I'm also keeping the entire interior of the book black and white on white pages to control the cost to the buyer and so that it will work well even on older ereaders.

With all of that explanation, here it is, the title page to "Off the Rails and Other Tales."

(c) 2012 Jason L. Liquori

Teaser photo 2

Ok, gang, this is the second photo I'd like to start spreading around.  The first is in our previous blog.  The title of the Book is planned to be "Off the Rails and Other Tales" unless we run into some kind of trouble with that.  Doing the layout tomorrow.

The Profreading Never Ends

Yes, I'm aware of the typo in the heading of this blog.

Doing these short stories for the anthology collection, "Off the Rails and Other Tales", I've found that not only is there never enough rewriting, but there never seems to be enough proofreading.  I've used outside help for editing and proofreading and even after I've given the stories a good once over (something I rarely do in my blog.  Sorry), they've found plenty of misspellings, grammar issues and typos to fix.  When I get the stories back I give them a once over again and occasionally still find things we both missed.  Twice!

So, when the book comes out, please realize, that we did put a lot of effort into making it read smoothly, or at least, as intended and any typos you may find snuck in under several passes of the radar.

One of the stories, "Front Window, An Alien Vengeance Short Story", is written in a format that throws a lot of people.  It's very short and I thought an appropriate piece to experiment with a bit.  I figure if you're going to self publish, you should do things a little differently.  It's sort of like making independent movies.  Part of the point of being independent is doing things a major company would be afraid to risk doing.

That last sentence didn't sound right.  Where are my proofreaders?