Writing, Self-Publishing, Book Marketing

Hi, y’all! My name’s Jenn Handy - another of your Wordclay team members/brunch buddies. As you might be able to tell, I’ve come to Indiana by the way of Texas - I miss San Antonio, but Bloomington’s a great small town and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to go back home, or live in a big city, again.

After graduating from high school in San Antonio, I found my way to Bloomington, Indiana, not really intending to go to school at Indiana University - I mostly came because I wanted my mommy. It’s a long story.  I ended up going to IU for about seven years, off and on, making pit stops in Florida and New Hampshire along the way, before finally graduating in Fall of 2000 with a General Studies degree, which I argue is even more useless than Justin’s degrees in English and Philosophy.

My first experiences with the book publishing industry came from working at Independent Bookstores in Florida, New Hampshire and Indiana.  As small as these stores were, I enjoyed working with the customers, surrounded by books, learning the retail end of a business in which I’d always been peripherally interested. But, as we all know, Independent Bookstores can’t pay their employees too well.  My first foray into the publishing side of the book industry was working for AuthorHouse as an Author Assistant, Book Designer, Design Consultant and, finally, Publishing Manager. Now, working for Wordclay, I design the interior of authors’ books, should they decide to purchase Custom Typesetting through our Services Store.

Hopefully in the following weeks or months, I’ll be able to pass on some of my design knowledge, make suggestions, answer questions, and refer people to books that I think are especially well layed-out.     

Which brings us to the title of this post… I just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at IU - Bloomington. I am not going to even pretend that I understood much of the book, especially the analogy he drew between what Gödel did with Principia Mathematica and what a human consciousness does on a daily basis, but I mention the book and Prof. Hofstadter because he made it a point to talk about the formatting of his book within the book itself.

He’s apparently always typeset his own books, rewriting whole paragraphs so that they’re pleasing to the eye without using hyphenation to relieve the varied spacing caused by full-justification of the text. Which is totally awesome but you should see his chapter starts!  Different sizes and styles of fonts; a repeating glyph which he uses for the chapter starts and as scene breaks throughout the text; with a raised cap at the beginning of the first paragraph in the chapter, the following four letters descending in size till the letters are the size of the main body text. It’s just all too much!  Way too cluttered!  Always, always, the rule to follow, when designing anything - keep it simple. Of course, he could be making a graphical statement about the concepts in his book that I’m just not smart enough to get.

Okay, then! I guess that’s enough musing for one day. If anyone has read Prof. Hofstadter’s book or happens to glance through it, let me know what you think… Till my next post, then, adios and be well!