book design

Leslie Michael’s family have an extensive history that was impacted by the Holocaust and he wanted to share this in the form of a book that would be a legacy to his family and serve as an educational piece that would raise awareness.

Inspired by The AJR My Story project, also designed by Hello Lovely Design and Co, Leslie was a keen writer with an engaging talent for storytelling, but little experience of self-publishing and the stages required to create a printed book.

The text, carefully reviewed by a contact of Leslie’s, was designed in InDesign to suit the text and images, with space for family trees and footnotes, and the typography selected to support Cyrillic characters. Images, like any historical publication, may fall short of the quality required for print so the page design allowed for large and small placement to go someway to resolving this, should the image not be available for better reproduction or could only be resolved to a certain standard by Photoshop.

The book went through several proof stages, including proofreading by ProofNow to approval and printing with Book Print UK. A second publication followed, Ankers Away, which followed a very similar workflow.

During the production of this title, Leslie was concerned about the amount of words and size of the book at 288 pages (inclusive of prelims and appendices). Sara Donaldson of Northern Editorial kindly peer-reviewed the pages and suggested some small updates. We agreed that it was a solid publication, and to reduce the words would be a costly editorial and design change. To stay within budget, since Leslie has family in the USA who receive copies, we explored paper weights. Ankers Away became a softback cover to reduce print and shipping costs, and an online Adobe publication.

Leslie is now assessing next steps, which could involve a website and publishing both titles on IngramSpark for commercial publishing.