For a number of years, I worked as an independent novelist. I’ve always written fiction, but as my craft developed, I became more interested in the creative potential of the tools I was using. I realised how limited word processors were in comparison to industry-grade publishing tools such as Adobe InDesign. It seemed a shame for modern authors to still draft their work as though they were writing with typewriters in the 1960s when so much more was possible.

a fella with a guitar — A fella with a guitar

After drafting a 700+ page novel in Adobe InDesign, making full use of its intricate capabilities, some poets and memoirist friends of mine reached out for help with formatting their book projects. I helped a punk band lay out a final-tour diary, a theatre director make a poster and programme, and a poet format a chapbook of concrete poetry.

Case Study: Poetry Chapbook

Impressed by the novel I’d written, a poet asked if I could format a chapbook he had written. A small publisher was interested in his work but their in-house designer was on leave. Could I step in to help out? The project seemed particularly interesting because the poetry in question was concrete poetry, which needed care and attention to accurately lay out on the page, so I accepted the commission.

How I Did It

After receiving the Word document of the poems in question, I took some notes of specific challenges or uncertainties I foresaw. I reached out to the poet to get a clearer picture of his vision for the project. I also contacted the publisher to get details about page dimensions and publishing criteria.

With that in hand, I began drawing up the book in Adobe InDesign. I chose published chapbooks that the poet admired as models, and made note of details in them such as margins, line spacing, font choices, and page numbering. I didn’t adhere slavishly to their approach but they helped guide my decisions all the same.

I set up two separate documents in InDesign: the first consisted of the front matter – copyright information, title page, table of contents and dedication. The second document consisted of the poems themselves, laid out in sequence.

I set up type styles and parent pages to ensure consistency and to make it easier and quicker to add or modify poem layouts as I worked on them. Because of the idiosyncrasies of concrete poetry, I also had to consult with the poet quite often. Their work involved deletions, unusual indentations and varied alignments. They had used workarounds and hacks to lay out the poems in Microsoft Word, which didn’t work the same when copy-and-pasted into Adobe InDesign. I wanted to be sure that, as I transcribed their work, I didn’t interfere with their vision for the poems.

Reaching Professional Standards

The project revealed unexpected challenges as I progressed. The poet hadn’t changed their document from the default A4 page setup, so the difference in page dimensions between their document and the intended book size meant that line breaks and page breaks did not correspond. Another challenge was that I wanted the book to feel professional, with page numbers, page headers, and consistent margins and spacing. All these details, as well as having to consider the double-sided printing of a book’s leafs, changed the look and feel of some of the poems. By studying the model chapbooks I’d collected, I found different ways of designing the page to suit the material. I drew up comparative prototypes based on those approaches to to see which the poet preferred, and liaised frequently with them on design decisions.

One particular problem I had was that the poet had used a monospaced typeface in their document, something which simplified text alignment on their part but that I worried would look amateurish once published. After showing them some sample texts to explain why I felt that way, they agreed to use a different font. However, that required careful adjustment of letter kerning and tracking in some key places, to ensure the poems looked on the page as the poet originally wanted.

Signing Off the Project

With the book text in place and at a standard comparable to the models I had been referring to, I made a ‘book’ in InDesign, which combines pre-existing documents into one file. This was useful for managing page numbers, and for making sure that changes made to the front matter didn’t have any knock-on effects for the collected poems.

I also had to arrange the text for the book’s front and back cover. One thing that was particularly important to keep in mind for that task was the bleed: I had to extend the cover design past the dimensions so that when the publisher printed them, there was no risk that the very edges might fall outside the margin for error and show up blank.

I made sure while working on different drafts to use a consistent format for document names, so that when it was time to send the final print-ready PDF to the publisher, there would be no mistaking which was the most recent and up-to-date.

The PDF uploaded in this portfolio is a modified version of the finished book’s contents. It consists of the front matter and only one poem, at the request of the author.

Skills developed:

Book formatting/design
Text format adaptation
Client liaising
Comparative prototyping

Software used:

Adobe InDesign
Microsoft Word