Today I got JD Whitcomb’s
Live Pterosaurs in America from Amazon. It’s in many ways delightful. The cover, instead of a pterosaur, just shows a greyish, low-quality photo of a lake and some office buildings (apparently, a pterosaur was sighted near there). And the back cover blurb is just fantastic!
”Liars” the newspaper professionals pinned on two men who professed building a flying machine. How dare they? Bicycle mechanics! The Wright Brothers must be wrong. But secret flight did become known. [1]
One century later, ”liars” a few web pages pinned on a few men who professed pterosaurs are alive. How dare they? Bible-believing creationists! [2] They must be wrong. But just as two men tried to fly on the East Coast in 1903, a few men tried to observe the flight of a strange creature on the West Coast in 2007. [3] One man, Scott Norman, succeeded. But the secret location is not the shocking secret [4]: Many Americans have seen large pterosaur-like creatures in many states.
1. I love this: ”But secret flight did become known.” Secret flight. Of the Wright Brothers.
2. Creationists are people too – fun, regular people, despite our differences – a useful reminder for me, who, as a Scandinavian, have never met any.
3. This totally made my day, not only the whole Wright Brothers comparison but comparing
trying to fly with ”
trying to witness the flight of a strange creature”!
4. As if any location in itself, however secret, could be more shocking than live pterosaurs.
That said, it’s not all delightful. It looks very home-made, must be the result of self-publishing, and like many self-published books it a) is set in Times New Roman (11-point) and b) marks paragraphs with whitespace in between them, not by indenting the first line. It’s peculiar that all these people who want to make books, you would think it’s because they like books, yet they don’t know what an actual book looks like.
Self-publishing Fortean writers, take note: Times New Roman is
never used in real books, simply because it’s too ugly! And whitespace in between every paragraph, which makes stuff so easy to read on the web, actually makes printed books
harder to read. If you look at a real book made by professionals, the first line in each paragraph is indented, and whitespace is used to divide the text into larger sections. Simple readability aside, this is an extra level of organization, that you’re not currently using.
Also, ”indented” means by three or four millimeters, not by the half inch you are right now thinking about using!
(Perhaps, in this case, this was done to make the text fill more pages. It’s only a hundred pages as it is. It’s surprising to see a book thinner than a brick today, but I actually like it.)
If you want to be taken seriously, it’s a very good idea to make your book look like an actual book, not like something a crank would make. I know what you’re thinking: people who judge a book by the typesetting are dumb and immature and you don’t wanna pander to them. But believe me, no matter how immature you deem it, most intelligent and educated people think this way.
I’m not being mean to an amateur who doesn’t know how to make a book. I’m being mean to someone who, when looking at a proper book, doesn’t see what it looks like, which for me is incomprehensible, but describes most self-publishing Fortean writers. And for that, I apologize. I hope you take my very constructive criticisms to heart.
Sincererly,
Someone Who Works in Publishing
Helpful PS: Instead of Times New Roman, if you have a PC, you can use Palatino Linotype, Georgia or Cambria – if you have a Mac, use Baskerville, Big Caslon, Didot or Hoefler. They won’t win you any design awards maybe but they’ll look an ass-lot better than anything called Times. If you look around on the web, you can also find other fonts than those that came pre-installed on your computer.