One of the things I never get tired of hearing about Shivering Sands is: “It looks like a real book!”

I mean it is, obviously, a real book in that it’s really pages of printed words on paper with a cover.  But what I think most people mean by that exclamation point of whodathunkit! is that it doesn’t look like a POD book.  Or, more precisely, like they expected a POD book to look like.

And that’s down to two things: One, Lulu use good paper – the interior is 60# white text stock, which means it’s a solid weight that holds crisp printing, and the cover stock is 100# laminated so it’s not too light or to heavy, and it holds vibrant color and clear text.  And two, I didn’t make the thing with 12 different typefaces all double-spaced and centered at 20pt.

I can’t say much about the first point beyond yes, POD shops do use decent paper these days, so you’re not getting a “book” that’s just copy paper with a wire-o binding stuck on.  That’s a bit of a big deal compared to ten years ago, or what you’ll get at Kinkos, sure – but that’s just where we are in the technology, now.  POD shops are (mostly) all at the point where they can and do offer affordable “real” books.

But the second point, well that I can talk about a little more.  Because a good looking book with crap content is still a crap book – but wonderful content that you can’t actually read is also a crap book. So I want to talk about the design of book a little, because Warren gave me the wonderful content to play with, but I’m pretty proud of having made it look good.

There are a lot of rules, guidelines, public and private knowledge, and general best practices to book layout and design.  And I broke about as many as I followed, so hell if I’m going to even attempt to quote them all, heh.  Instead, I’m just going to talk you through some of my process and intentions, and you can take from that what you will.  One of the blessings and curses of POD is that you’re in charge of the finished product, after all.

So, to start with: Type.  Shivering Sands is – with the exception of the three instances of Futura Bold on the cover – set in Caslon.  Top to bottom, front to back: one typeface.  And that strict adherence to a single type isn’t absolutely necessary, but it really is a good idea.  At most, you should really only have two typefaces in your entire book, and one of those should only be headings.

And, look, I get it – I love fonts, I do.  I download types that I can’t even think of a use for just because I think they’re pretty.  And even though my aesthetic leans to the clean and minimalist, my first draft of Shivering Sands had about four or five different typefaces to see how things could look.  There’s a very real temptation – especially if you usually work with web-safe fonts – to go a little fancy in print.

The thing is, looking at that first draft… well, I already knew this, but it really hit home when I was seeing the layout on my screen: a book isn’t about a hodgepodge (or even a well-behaved family) of fancy fonts.  A book, at its best, a collection of ideas in (if the designer does their job right) a portable and readable format.

And Warren’s ideas and the words he uses to make them solid, whatever he may say about them, are like the prettiest girl in the world:  They don’t need makeup.  So for draft two of the book, I pulled back to a single, simple, nearly invisible typeface.  And suddenly every page was drop-dead gorgeous.  No single word was vying for attention with an exaggerated ascender or stroke-weight.  When you read Shivering Sands, your eye should quickly learn the shape and weight of all the letters… and then completely ignore them, and just let the content beam straight into your brain.

Which isn’t to say that the layout is boring.

I knew going in that we were going to be working with essays – a lot of short form pieces – and I wanted to stick some even shorter bits in from Twitter.  Those Twitter bits between pieces were my idea – I started calling them sorbet, to cleanse the brain palate between rants, heh.  But there is some attention to the details of the format that makes navigating a book like that as easy from start to finish as it is if you just pick it up and let it fall to a page.

Tiny little things like changing the right-page headers to the title of the essay if you’re four pages in.  It’s a small detail, but it lets you easily flip back to the first page if you’ve just opened the book on a whim.  Right-justifying the bursts of sorbet (that still cracks me up, and that’s all I ever want to call Twitter, anymore) and dropping them to small-caps to clearly define that you’re on a page of concentrated information that exists alongside but independently of the essay content.  Even the full-page, left-side titles to each essay – the “take a deep breath, ’cause we’re heading into the next one” pages serve to break the book into digestible chunks of content.

And some of that I would, of course, do very differently for a work of long-form fiction, or a photobook, or anything else.  The point is, it’s a really good idea to think about layout – any layout, from books to shirts to web to notes – in terms of how you want it to be read, and how you can help the reader follow along.

And that leads me to the actual content.  It’s probably not technically design, but there is some overlap.  Warren picked about 90% of what went into Shivering Sands and I did my job as editor to pick a couple more essays and all the Twitterbits. But when you’re dealing with any sort of modular content (essays and art/photos being the main ones), it’s worth your time to sit down and fiddle with the order a bit.  A book is, after all, a container – and an organized toolbox is a lot more useful than a junk drawer.  For my part, I just put the essays in roughly chronological order, because they flowed quite well that way, I thought, and then I spliced in the sorbet with some eye to complementing the surrounding content… with the occasional bit of random thrown in for fun.  If I did my job right, Shivering Sands should read like an album, with one piece flowing into the next as well as any one piece stands on its own.

By way of some general advice: we’re very used to the web breaking left-aligned paragraphs with a double-space, and sans serif typefaces to make everything easy to read.  That’s because we’re usually digesting smaller chunks of text, serif typefaces look a bit crap on a monitor at smaller sizes, and browsers are pretty crap at justification for anything but the narrowest columns. 

For books, it’s a really good idea to pick a serif typeface, a comfortable and consistent line-height, and indent the first line of a new paragraph. There are SCIENTIFIC reasons for that – serifs leading the eye along a line, indents clearly marking a new paragraph without the jolt of a double-break, etc – but mostly it just looks good, let’s be honest.  I’d lay odds that the books you may have picked up and thought “Oh, this isn’t a real book” are the ones that just didn’t follow those three simple steps.

And, as with any rules, there’s wiggle room:  I went with a much looser justification and taller line-height for Shivering Sands than I would have for a navel, for instance.  A little to give the lines room to breathe, and a little because I’ve been doing the same in my web layouts of warrenellis.com for ages – it’s an aesthetic I find pleasing and readable for essays and dense info dumping.  And I had a bit of fun calling back to the web-roots of the pieces in things like the full-indent and padding in inline quotes (which, in turn, is the web calling back to newspapers, magazines, and academic texts) because, again, it was my book to play with, and I think it looks good.

And that’s basically your takeaway, right there.  You must own books, I really hope, so you can thumb through and pay attention and learn how to make them look.  Start simple, with the layout of your own book, and then find the places where you want to have a bit of fun and make the design more “you.” And then, when you’re done, and you’ve got your printout or your proof, just flip the book open to a random page and really look at it.  If you’re honest with yourself and you say “this looks good” – then there you go.  If not, well, maybe just dial it back, just a bit.  Remember that you’re making a Thing For People To Read, and that doesn’t mean it can’t be a work of art… so long as people can read it.

I realize it’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted, so this is just to say that I didn’t stop the planet and get off or anything. My mornings have been occupied by day-job work (as per usual), but yesterday afternoon I jaunted down to the Emerson Salon to get my hair done; and today I moseyed over to the Science Fiction Museum (its offices, rather) for an interview with a marvelous woman from a marvelous magazine.

(I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, though, so in deference to caution I’ll just be vague and conspiratorial.)

Anyway, each of these events took several hours including travel time to-and-from,* and the rest of my writer-work days have been occupied with the usual time-whittling business emails, phone calls, bill paying, and errand-running. So there are no new words to report on Ganymede, and no one is more rueful on this point than yours truly.

But the night is still young.

______________________________________________________________
* Yes, several hours for the hair. I think it’s worth it, once every five or six weeks, to have awesome peacock tresses. The day will eventually come that I change my mind, I’m sure; but for now I’m happy for an afternoon wherein I am not responsible for anything except holding still while the nice man paints up my ‘do.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when we briefly worked together with Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.

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Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Courtesy of crisper (many thanks!) four graphs of the pulp publication data:

And since some folks are asking for further breakdown and I can't do that right now, I've uploaded the original spreadsheets:

• Total list of the pulps
• Romance pulps
• Saucy/spicy pulps
• Science fiction pulps
• Sports pulps
• Western pulps

And, yeah, I know there were probably a lot better ways to do these spreadsheets, both mathematically and aesthetically.

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called ?order to net.?

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

Title:The Devil You Know
Word: starch
Challenger: @annie_kathleen
Length: 200 words exactly

My twenty-second reboot this year, apparently.

Apparently, of course, because I've no memory of previous reboots. That's the deal: for an incredible amount of money, you sign away five years. And one day you wake up, it's five years later, and you have only the guarantee that there are no outstanding warrants for criminal activity.

But reboots regularly wipe your memories. I know I'm more muscular now and I have dark hair instead of blonde. No idea when that happened; could be yesterday, could be two years back. According to the labels in my room, I insist on no starch when my shirts are laundered. Why? No idea.

I stand in front of the machine, pondering. It's always my choice, you see. They make that very clear.

I could decide not to reboot, say I've had enough. I'd forfeit the vast majority of the fee, but I could do it.

I'd have my old life back.

Or I can press the button, hope like hell that the reboot goes wrong, that it wipes out memories from prior to joining up.

I'm told I've pressed the button eighty-three times previously.

I ponder, decide which is safer.

Then I press the button.

� Lee Barnett, 2010

This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first fifty stories in the challenge can be found here. New challenges can be made here.

The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges...

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

This is, perhaps, the geekiest thing I?ve done in many a month, but it does help me answer a question that?s been bothering me for a while: if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that?

Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet. (Yes, I?m a stat wonk, I guess).

So, here you go. The link brings you to a spreadsheet I created, covering the years 1896-1960, with seven categories: Overall, Detective Pulps, Romance Pulps, Saucy/Spicy Pulps, Science Fiction Pulps, Sports Pulps, and Western Pulps. (I?d present the information as an easy-to-read table, but?-embarrassingly-?I never learned how to make them). Each entry is for the number of magazines?-not issues?-in that category published that year, so for 1898 there was only one pulp published, in 1931 there were 150 pulps total published, including 28 detective, 24 romance, 8 saucy/spicy, 8 science fiction, 2 sports, and 33 westerns. The number in the Overall category won?t equal the sum of the other categories because I omitted smaller pulp genres (boxing, weird menace) and pulps publishing general pulpy adventure fiction and because some pulps, like Western Rodeo Romance, fit into two categories.



Now, admittedly, this is a hasty and imprecise collection of data-?what would be more useful would be a) the number of pulps published broken down by month as well as by year (can?t be done-?that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps) and b) the sales figures (someone may have some of that data, but, again, that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps). But we can draw some tentative conclusions from this.

First, the pulps didn?t die around 1950. That was the peak post-WW2 year for them. The death of the pulps was a gradual thing, although by 1955 the end of the medium and its replacement by the digest format must have been obvious. Nonetheless, I think it?s fair to say that the death of the pulps and the transition to digests took a while. One obvious precursor was the transition from dime novels to pulps in the 1910s. I don?t have the data to do a similar spreadsheet on dime novels (although, hmm, I could put one together using Galactic Central), but I know, based on the western and detective dime novels, that their death and replacement by the pulps in the 1910s was gradual and not sudden. I think the death of the pulps was like that.

Second, and I know this will be hard for the sf zealots to read, but...sf wasn?t the most important genre for the pulps. (And, please, never write the phrase "the pulp genre." There was no such thing. The pulps were the medium, not the genre). Until 1939 there were more spicy pulps published every year than sf pulps. (Why the number of spicy pulps declined is another question, one I can?t answer). From 1937 to 1951 there were more sports pulps published every year than sf pulps. Westerns clobber sf. And romance pulps...well, this will gall the geeks, but romance pulps were more important to the industry than sf pulps. (And the average pulp romance story was approximately eight times better written than the average pulp sf story, but that?s another issue).

Third, take a look at the saucy/spicy list. The first one came out in 1912. That?s before detective pulps, before westerns, before sf, before romance, before everything except general fiction, adventure, and railway. The saucy/spicy pulps are criminally understudied, not least because they are much less available to scholars than even the romance or sports pulps, but they were around for a long time and deserve further study. Hell, from 1915 to 1924 they made up at least 10% of the entire industry.

Fourth-?the number of Westerns! Criminy! For such a formulaic genre (with a few exceptions) it was remarkably popular. In terms of market share, from 1936, Westerns were the heavyweight of pulps, never making up less than 25% of the entire market.

Fifth, look at the overall numbers for 1929-1931. You?d think that the first three years of the Depression wouldn?t have been a good time to enter publishing or increase the number of pulps that you were already publishing, but clearly people thought it was. I don?t have numbers to hand, but I suspect the economy took a substantial dip from 1931-1933, which would explain the decrease there, but after 1933 the numbers resume increasing.

I?m sure other conclusions will occur to me later, but that?s what I?ve got for now.

I occasionally do these. And today's an occasion. So why not?

A - Act your age? Like most other people, sometimes I act younger than my age, positively childishly in fact.
B - Born on what day of the week? Monday, so I'm told. I don't remember it all that well. I'd put money on the fact that I cried like a baby though.
C - Chore you hate? Filling out memes.
D - Z See answer to C

Interesting though, sparked by something Antony Johnston wrote.

I wonder who I've known the longest online, i.e. who, that I now often interact online with, I've known the longest.

I'm excluding people where the only online contact is by email or IM, because that's just replaced letterwriting or the phone. So that takes out Ian, my oldest friend, because although we email each other, he's not on Twitter and doesn't use Facebook.

And I can't include Laura because although we occasionally "like" something each other has put on Facebook, or chat on IM, it's not exactly as if that's a large part of how we communicate with each other. Similarly, I'm excluding my younger brother because... well, I've known him for 44 years. It kind of skews the results.

OK, so lets set some parameters.

I'm not including anyone I've known for more than 15 years, because I got online in August 1995. I'm limiting it to people I have interacted with, or still interact with, via a message board, forum, Twitter, Facebook or chat rooms.

Obvious answer is people like Warren, Neil, Dave... comics pros with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends after we first met at Compuserve's Comics/Animation Forum, and other friends from Compuserve like Rich Johnston, Alan Porter and Elayne Riggs. (I'm excluding Tony Isabella and Dez Skinn because, although friends, again I only ever really speak to them by email these days)

Despite Colin Murtagh being a close friend, I'm pretty sure we didn't meet for a few months after I got online, and I didn't meet Tony Lee until this century. (Always surprises me, that one - that I've only known Tony that relatively short space of my life.)

So yeah, Warren, Neil, Dave. It's all your fault, mates.

It's genuinely astonishing to me how many people who are important to me as part of my life now... have only known Philip as a fact, i.e. they didn't know me before he was born.

From the Straits Times of Singapore, 23 July 1928.