Our client wanted a cover that encapsulated the iconoclastic spirit of the Enlightenment — the birth of skepticism, secularism and the full flowering of the scientific method. The natural candidates for this were Voltaire, the great French thinker and Emile du Chatelet, his intellectual equal and lover. We selected three period-appropriate typefaces for the title: p22 Declaration, based on the penmanship on the American Declaration of Independence, Bodoni, designed in 1798 and Requiem Text, based on the humanist typefaces of Renaissance Italy. The typefaces and painting formed a harmonious combination, and Voltaire stares out at the viewer with a frank air of challenge.

If you are afflicted by self-doubt, procrastination, attention deficit disorder, old-fashioned laziness or a simple inability to get things done, 43 Folders is a very useful source of advice. Completely devoid of motivational bumph and navel-gazing, Merlin Mann’s mission is to help you avoid distraction and get on with your real work. For example:

• set your email to update once an hour, rather than every five minutes.
• Writers should write, rather than read books about writing.
• Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you anticipate it will take longer than you expect
• Spend significant time thinking rather than filling up every moment of your time with activity

Many of his thoughtful and amusing musings boil down to the following nugget: “Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.“

In the realm of layout and design, Adobe products tend to loom very large. Most designers submit to their gravitational pull and use at least one and usually all of the big three: Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. However, there are plenty of people whose design needs are not extensive enough to justify the purchase of these quite expensive products. They recognise the diabolical shortcomings of Microsoft’s drawing and layout programs, and hence strike out for an alternative. Scribus and Inkscape may appeal to those with a DIY frame of mind. Both are free, and both were developed by a fairly egalitarian community of developers.

Scribus is a page layout program. Its capabilities largely mirror those of InDesign and QuarkXpress, but it cannot open files created with those programs (for practical and legal reasons). Those familiar with commercial layout packages will find the Scribus interface very familiar. Additional and improved features are added on a rolling basis, and new builds can be downloaded from their website.

Inkscape is an Illustrator/CorelDRAW analogue. The drawing tools are adequate for all but the most demanding users, and files can be output into industry standard formats such as EPS and PDF. As per Scribus, the developer community surrounding the program is open and cooperative, and the program continues to evolve.

Awaiting the return of a book from the printers is a nerve-racking time. Authors worry about errors, page ordering mistakes,  the cover design and the overall feel of the work. In the end, a book is an artefact as well as a collation of words and ideas. If the book looks flimsy, poorly bound, the cover curls up and the paper type feels wrong, disaster may be in the offing. What many authors don’t know is that printers are happy to make up a ‘dummy’ of their book before printing. The dummy replicates the paper type, weight, cover stock, binding style and page extent, but is completely blank. It is not a proof — that comes later in the process.  A book dummy allows the author or publisher to assess the feel and quality of the book before printing it. In conjunction with the printers proof and thorough checking, it is a means of ensuring the quality and accuracy of the whole production. In addition, your leftover book dummy will make a dandy notebook.

Planning documents such as magazines, handbooks and newsletters can be daunting. Many editors use a form of flat plan to map out the document, showing how one page relates to another, allocating advertising space and the flow of articles.  Flat plans can be set out in programs such as Word, Excel and even InDesign.

A new option has recently become available — the online flat plan. Online flat plans enable a large number of people to access the same file whatever their location, and to quickly map the building blocks of a long document. These document planning solutions are a prime example of web 2.0 at its best — innovative, customisable, updateable and easy to use. Intelligent Flat Plan charges on a per page basis, and the slightly less fully featured Blink Plan charges a monthly rate.

Any author intending to sell their books via bookstores or online will need an ISBN/EAN 13 number, from which the barcode can be derived and added to the cover. Adding Cataloguing in Publication (CiP) data to the imprint page of the book is also a very good idea. For more information, click here.

Cataloguing in Publication (CiP) is a free service offered to publishers by the National Library of Australia to provide a bibliographic record for a book before it is published. When the book is published the CiP data is printed on the reverse side of the title page. The CiP data is also included in the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) available on Kinetica, Australia’s Library Network. Visit www.nla.gov.au/services/CIP.html for further information.