One hour and eleven minutes of me trying not to swear

The awesome Laura Dawson invited me to do a webinar on the basics of book design, as part of a series for Bowker’s SelfPublishedAuthor.com. Our kindly hosts/co-presenters at Data Conversion Laboratory have posted a video of the session, so now you can follow along with bated breath as I try to remember not to say “fuck” for more than an hour.1 Can she do it? Watch the video to find out!

Because the video is video and my slides are about fiddly details, I’ve made my segment of the presentation into a PDF, so you can see what I’m talking about: “Making Beautiful Books” webinar slides (2 MB)

I don’t think I said anything too terribly incorrect, though I have a bad feeling that what I call a “deckle edge” is actually called something else by printers. Whatever. That’s what it’s called in the world of my head.

I realized also, as soon as we were done, that I should have added to the “Resources” list that among the people one should consult are those professional book designers I recommended hiring. Because of course one’s designers will have clever ideas about how one’s book could be made into an even more irresistible package, as @SCauleyDesign did with that spot varnish on Point of View New York City that I show in the webinar.

  1. Yes, my portion of the presentation ran about fifteen minutes too long, because I hadn’t timed it beforehand and couldn’t see my system clock while screen-sharing the slides from PowerPoint. Sorry, Allan. []

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