Tag Archives: self-publishing

Book Covers and Illustrations

Family Connections, , , ,

Books and Illustrations

February 6, 2018

I will guess that the first thing you will notice about The Handel Letters: A Biographical Conversation is the cover. I opted for the matte finish paperback cover, and I am glad I did. It feels and looks good—a good choice, I think. CreateSpace has various templates for covers, and Mr. Humphrey, in his CreateSpace for Beginners, discusses these templates, admitting that he uses them 95% of the time. Such cookie cutter covers were one thing I really wanted to avoid in creating my book, so I chose to ask my daughter, Alexis Stahl, to create the cover and upload it to the CreateSpace site. This was one of the last things done before giving CreateSpace the go-ahead for publishing, but as the cover is likely the first thing readers will see, let me comment on it here.

Alexis Stahl has a BA in Art from Tulane University (Newcomb College) and an MFA in Art from the University of Cincinnati. Files for the front, back, and spine of the Handel book were hers to design and adapt to the required sections and pages on CreateSpace’s website. Of course, she ran everything by me beforehand, but I was so glad to turn that task over to her. Quite aside from the technical skills involved in uploading the files correctly, her real challenge was in creating the drawings that would serve as chapter head illustrations and as images arranged on the cover of the book. Using some of the pictures from the book interior on the cover was her idea, and I think it was an excellent one.

I will talk another time about some of the individual chapter head illustrations, but for now I want to draw your attention to how she created a pleasing and meaningful collage as a front cover. There needed to be a certain amount of symmetry, with images of similar shape and size lined up on either side and down the middle. In the middle there are long, horizontal figures, and on either side there are images of roughly similar shape and size included opposite each other. Prominent, in the center, and in bolder print, is a thematically important drawing of a pair of white- gloved hands holding an old-fashioned sealed letter. The seal is in red and matches the only other red-colored writing on the cover—the title and author’s name. Against a cream-colored background, all of the grey-toned drawings suggest ideas to be found in the book and simultaneously create a pleasing picture in and of themselves. I applaud Alexis on creating a unique and attractive cover.

You might wonder what kind of art background would be influential in leading to the cover Alexis created. I am pretty sure much of the creativity that went into creating the cover is simply part of my daughter’s natural talent coming to the fore—no undue maternal pride there, right? However, you will find it interesting, no doubt, to know that her specialization in studying art was in printmaking. I have nearly twenty of her prints of various sorts—abstract, realistic, or thematic—framed and displayed upon my walls.   But I have one of her artworks that clearly underscores the skill and aesthetic perspective necessary for creating the cover of the Handel book. And that is a small hand-made book Alexis created some few years ago—a hand-stitched book, 4.5 inches by 8.5 inches, with a black cloth cover and marbled inside and end papers. She agreed to let me share with you a page from the book, but please do respect her ownership of the image. It is, after all, part of a larger unique piece of art. Here is the page I’ve chosen to share:

I plan to write more about book illustrations next time and to consider the genre or category that seems most appropriate for The Handel Letters. Meanwhile, thank you for dropping by.

Introducing This Blog about Handel and Books and Folklore

The Handel Seminar Continues, ,

A Blog about Handel and Books and Teaching and Folklore

February 5, 2018

I may eventually move on to another task in writing this blog, but for now my aim is to expand upon some of the content and ideas in my recently published book, The Handel Letters: A Biographical Conversation, and, hopefully, to stimulate thoughts and responses from you who take the time to read these short essays. I plan to move through the book from beginning to end. As Maria says in the “Do-Re-Mi” song in The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She then proceeds to teach the von Trapp children the musical scale, using the sol-fa syllables for the major scale. I suppose I will never escape being a teacher, so I will follow Maria’s teaching practice and start at the very beginning.

First, I invite you to purchase or borrow the book. It is available in paperback or as an ebook, and by now I hope libraries have a copy available. Please ask them to order it if they don’t. The ISBN is 9781977669179. I like the paperback, and my first order of business will be to describe how the physical entity—the 626-page book—came to be.

Throughout my career as a professor, I was expected to write “scholarship”—books and articles that added in some way to our understanding of my chosen academic field. And those scholarly works were published by university presses (books) or peer-reviewed journals (articles). My Handel project was not that kind of writing. It did involve research, certainly, but I decided to write with a different audience and objective in mind. I may say more about that later, but for now, the related decision I made that I want to share here is the decision to self-publish, to not seek out a publisher but instead to have everything pretty much under my own control. It was an exhilarating experience. It’s not that I regret having published through traditional presses and journals, but this time, it was fun, as a retired professor, no longer worrying about tenure or promotions, to simply see what could be done without a publisher—or, as one Handel biographer would say about Handel’s efforts to compose without a patron, I chose to undertake this publication “on my own bottom.”

I didn’t just jump into the process blindly. I read lots of blogs online on how to self-publish. I researched the various possibilities—Amazon’s CreateSpace, BookBaby, and other resources. And I watched one very informative Great Courses course on “How to Publish Your Book [ https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-publish-your-book.html ]. The person giving the lectures was Jane Friedman, a professor and publishing professional. I found her advice very helpful. Self-publishing was only one possibility she presented, and she was very clear about the potential down side of deciding to self-publish. As I said, my own decision was influenced very much by my own situation. I wanted to do something quite different from the kind of writing and “publish or perish” activity that dominated my career as a professor.

In the end, I decided to go with Amazon’s CreateSpace paperback publishing enterprise and then add the ebook format afterwards. If you are a skilled formatter, you can do all of the preparations yourself and set up publication on demand through Amazon for free. I knew that the formatting tasks were beyond me, so I opted to pay for that service, letting their professionals format the content following my directions. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easily this was done and with how good the final product looked. I did not use their paid editing or cover design services, but I thought the interior design service was well worth the money. Sadly, just this month CreateSpace has announced that they will no longer offer that service, though they will continue to publish books already formatted and ready to print.

As I was preparing my manuscript, I consulted again several online sources, and I bought a helpful guide, CreateSpace for Beginners, by M. L. Humphrey. The guidebook would be especially helpful if you planned to do the formatting yourself, but I found it useful in others ways as well. The author even addressed the differing advantages and disadvantages in creating a print copy for book of fiction or a nonfiction piece. For my book, I wasn’t quite sure how to categorize the work. Is The Handel Letters a biography of Handel and thus a work of nonfiction, or is it a work of historical or literary fiction? I would be curious to know how you might categorize it after you have read it.

Let me finish this essay with a quick comment on the cover and illustrations. Again, part of the reason I chose to self-publish was that I wanted to decide on the cover and if and when I would insert illustrations. For years I have admired the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fairy tale collections that offered wonderful illustrations. The Dover version of George Webbe Dasent’s translation of the Norwegian tales, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, is one of my favorites, in part because of the wonderful illustrations. More recently, I liked the way J. K. Rowling included illustrations at the head of each chapter in all seven of the Harry Potter books.

I did not want anything like a graphic novel, but I did like the idea of having some memorable image from each chapter heading up the writing, along with a paragraph of slightly off-subject narrative. So, I opted for selecting a kind of icon from each chapter and discussed the possibilities with my artist/illustrator—my daughter, Alexis Stahl. She created the illustrations from my suggested ideas, and she designed the cover using some of those same illustrations. I couldn’t be more pleased with the end product. Next time I will say a little more about the illustrations and ponder further the category into which we—or libraries—might place the book.