Letters from Home has officially entered the production process! We had a conference call with our production team earlier this week to give them (lots of critical) feedback on the preliminary interior book design samples they proposed. I had made notes on everything from type faces (Berthold Garamond, if you please, for text; Felix Titling for chapter titles only; and Nobel for running heads), sizes (12/16, not 11.5/14), margins, facing pages, chapter title page design, paper stock, edge trim, etc. I’m pretty sure our designer and the production editor wanted to shoot themselves (or, more likely, me), but they said it was actually helpful to have me be so specific rather than just say I didn’t like it in general.
I received the manuscript back for check-of-edit after a copy editor went through it for spelling/style/grammar/punctuation. As my development editor said, it was an extremely clean manuscript, and the most frequent edit was the style for using dashes – I use “space/en-dash-space” (like I just did here) and Wiley house style is Chicago, which is “no space/em-dash/no space.” I will be working on going over the suggested changes during the next few days.
We are beyond thrilled to have received very enthusiastic feedback from the book publicists we approached for the project! This was a much different reception from what we received with our previous book (Wealthbuilding: Investment Strategies for Retirement and Estate Planning, ©2000). We are in the fortunate position of being able to narrow down the proposals we’ve received and select the publicist we feel can best promote the book, and we are quite excited to make our decision and get started straight away. Loads of terrific ideas, and it seems that the timing for our book couldn’t be better given what’s going on in the world.
There’s some interesting behind-the-scenes work going on to secure a particular key figure to write a Foreword, but I’m not at liberty to share any details at this point. If things fall into place, you’ll be among the first to know! In other news, an enormous international corporation has expressed interest in promoting the book, as one of its employees is profiled in it, and the company couldn’t get any better publicity than by sharing what this person had to say. Trust me, it’s an incredible story. We’ll see how that shakes out. And last, but by no means least, we are enormously humbled and deeply grateful to learn that the National September 11 Museum in NYC has offered to carry our book in its museum store. Pretty cool!
Back to work on the copy for the front inside flap, our bios for the back flap, securing back cover endorsements, writing the Acknowledgments, reviewing the revised page design and creating better web copy. I’m getting geared up to promote this work, and had a lovely compliment from my development editor, who has nothing to do with the book anymore but emailed to tell me that she picked up Chapter Nine again the other night just because she had been so inspired by it and really wanted to reread what I had written. Hoping that my words eventually inspire others as well!