When you finish a paper—even a really, really long one—it may feel like you’ve written a book, but it sure doesn’t look like a lovely little tome to crawl up with on the couch, right? It looks like a rather unwieldy, unfriendly blob of text that just keeps slithering up your screen as you scroll through it. And for over two years, that’s what Healing Hereafter looked like too!
And then my publisher and I did the layout. Suddenly, my blob of biblical proportions had two pages per screen, pictures interspersed amongst the text, different fonts, and (be still my heart!) even those random blank pages at the beginning and end that have no purpose except to make the book actually look like a book! It might seem strange, but the layout was the most invigorating part of the publishing process for me. For the first time, what I enjoyed writing looked like something I would enjoy reading! You don’t imagine a Word doc when you craft a book; you envision chapters and images and turnable pages.
Now that doesn’t mean laying out the book is easy, especially for a Type A fussbudget like me. Yeah, we’ve all been there when one little space or line completely messes up how everything else looks on the screen, right? Grrr. I think it took 10 tries or so to get everything lined up and numbered correctly and starting on either the left or right page, BUT DANG did it look good when it was done! One of the most satisfying moments in writing is seeing that final version of your book’s innards look exactly like you want. But hold the press! You can’t print that cherished first copy just yet; your story still needs some skin…
