It isn’t typical for authors to design their own books when they’re traditionally published, but with small presses, it sometimes happens. Invisible Violets is my debut book, and my publisher, Jill McCabe Johnson of Wandering Aengus Press, gave me the option to do the interior design and layout. Jill knew I’d done design work for Ooligan Press and for classes, and had checked out this Portfolio page before offering that option.
First, I designed my book interior as part of my Advanced Book Design class, the final design class in my grad program. The requirements for that were different from what my publisher needed, so I ended up with two versions.
The book interior for the class was in color, had to include images, and had to have an index. Though my book is a memoir in essays and might not seem like it lends itself to an index, I immediately knew mine would be a pop culture index, for all the song, album, TV show, band, book, poetry and movie references and allusions. At the time of this version, I didn’t have any blurbs yet and some things on the copyright page were TBD.
Here is a sampling of the glorious interior with images and including the excessive and obsessive index:
Then there was the real book, in black and white, without any images or index, and with the flower used as a section break marker (the technical term is “dinkus”) replaced by a more standard glyph. This version has real blurbs and the full copyright page.
In both versions, the type is larger than typical. I expected many of my readers would have low vision, so while I didn’t go full-on large print, I did up the type size. Both versions were a blast to design because there were all sorts of fun things like section breaks and footnotes and subheadings to design around.
Here is a sampling form the actual interior of the IRL book:
The best part of all of this—well, other than being able to control the layout of my book and obsess over every detail of design, knowing there are absolutely zero widows or orphans in my book and I like the look of all the pages—is that my publisher liked my work, and has hired me to do all the interiors at Wandering Aengus Press!
Chrys Buckley 