[lbo-talk] Supplement to book - advice

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Sat Apr 9 15:25:42 PDT 2011


I've been writing a book on the Climate Crisis scheduled to be published by Praeger in November. They are going to sell it a high price (around $50) with the main target audience as libraries. I've been thinking of putting out a graphic supplement I can sell at a more reasonable price. They are fine with this, and agreed to it my contract.

So I'm going to extract about 10,000 or fewer words from my 85,000 word book, and convey some of the rest of the information graphically, (10,000 words is about 25 pages, but the graphic book will be around 200 pages, so you can see the ratio of words to graphics. Very lossy compression, even with the graphics not nearly the same amount of info as the book). I have checked and I think I can find high quality graphics that convey what I want in the form of purchasable clip-art, public domain stuff and grapphics of commercial products I hope companies will let me have for free because free advertising.

So with my skillset: I can write the words, select the graphics that go with it. Choose which word/graphic combo should be placed on each set of two facing page. And then comes real graphic design and layout. Choosing overall font and layout for book. Making specific page by page decisions. Editing graphics because there a bunch of stuff besides sizing and clipping good graphics require (adjusting color tones, maybe making changes to make things compatible with layout). Also maybe a good graphic person will accept most graphic while telling me that certain ones really are not acceptable and I need to get more. (Maybe a good graphics person will already have a big clip art collection, plus access to other collections on a low per-graphic basis so that the cost of their providing substitutes won't be high.)

So, how big a deal would it be for a good graphics person to do all this? Instead of buying professional tools and trying to stuff I don't have the talent for (graphics have never been my strength) that might be a better way to go. But maybe this is not a tiny bit of work; a major contract is not an option for me.

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