An ISBN Of One's Own
Dec. 9th, 2013 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousHow weird is it that the thing I'm most enjoying right now about my finalized book cover is the ISBN? An ISBN is, among other things, a shortcut that book review blogs use to decide which small press and self-pub titles are serious, and which are so unprofessional that they'll refuse to accept review copies. It's not necessarily a fair shortcut, but it's a common one. There, above the barcode, is my very own ISBN. I'm like Pinocchio halfway through transmuting from wood to flesh. Any minute now, I'll begin to feel real. (Writers are odd creatures, but then, you've noticed that.)
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Date: 2013-12-10 04:25 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kern_(typography)
It's just the spacing between the letters, specifically the adjustments that get made to accommodate letter combinations that would otherwise have too much space between them and look bad.
(That's my graphic, by the way. The one that article originally had was a shitty example, and I told them I'd do a good one for free if they'd fucking fix it. >:-)
In the case of this cover, they're using a low-end font -- nothing wrong with that, it's a quite common way to get a fairly unique look, and there are many excellent free fonts in the world, but low-end calligraphic fonts are often not made with the embedded space adjustments for different letter combinations that happens automatically with a high-end, well-produced font. That's not a huge problem, it just means you have to (or should, at least) tweak the space between the letters by hand a bit. For a title of that length, that is a matter of a few seconds, and I am (mildly) upset on Sarah's behalf that no one could be bothered. :-) [It's worst around the s in Rugosa, in this example, and if it were me, I'd also tighten up the space between the C and the o a bit.]
It could be FAR, FAR WORSE. I am grateful that they chose an attractively quirky roundball calligraphy style; it's quite fetching. They could have done it in Papyrus or something godsawful like Aquiline, which is lovely pen-work, but has the worst spacing of any font I've ever encountered (as you can see in that link), and looks horrific if it's not carefully adjusted by hand -- between nearly every pair of letters, in my experience. And people use it all the time without adjusting it at all, which is just fucking embarrassing.
Please note, this extra pedantry is a hazard of the profession (a symptom of the same disease that causes me to involuntarily identify fonts in movie titles, and then note whether I have them, want them, or would rather die than use them), and in no way changes my excitement about this book. I will still buy the multiple copies I'm intending to buy if they don't fix it. But I will shake my head briefly at the state of my profession. Kids today. >:-)
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Date: 2013-12-09 07:16 am (UTC)Now about that big book......
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Date: 2013-12-11 06:33 am (UTC)A year is a long time to keep my fingers crossed.
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