The Porcupine's Quill

August 19, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Typing & tip sheets

I’m a little out of it today. This week my evenings have been spent staying up far too late reading The Hunger Games, since the third and final book comes out on the 24th. Everyone at work is laughing at me. Even Robin at the post office!

I’m also a little out of it because I’ve been typing so darn much and my brain is fried. We have a really exciting book coming out in Spring 2011 — title is as yet undecided — which is a collection of wood engravings by Caledon’s own Rosemary Kilbourn, a very talented and well-known artist in Canada and internationally. Each engraving is accompanied by some thoughts, memories, explanations, etc. by Rosemary. I’ve seen the manuscript and I already know it’s going to be a really beautiful, interesting book: her art is spectacular. The challenge? Rosemary doesn’t like or use computers — at all — so she delivered her manuscript in hard copy only.

Hmm ...

Well, we at the Quill need a soft copy to do any kind of typesetting or formatting, so I spent a whole day typing the manuscript onto our computer. This isn’t as bad as it sounds because, for one thing, I’m a very fast typist, and, for another, it allowed me to read through the manuscript while also doing something useful with it (that is, turning it into an electronic file we can work with). Next year I may get the chance to help edit it, which is really exciting for me because I haven’t had so much experience doing that here yet. I did edit George’s preface and Dr. Berona’s introduction to Book of Hours, but they were short pieces and I didn’t communicate very much with the authors about the changes we made.

Of course, typing up Rosemary’s manuscript only took up one day this week. So what else have I been doing? Lately I’ve spent a lot of time putting together tip sheets for our Spring 2011 list and also writing an article about George A. Walker for the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists’ Guild (Frances — it will be on its way to you shortly!). The CBBAG (pronounced ‘cabbage’) article is nearly finished and George is just giving it a look-over, but the tip sheets still need a lot of work — and I am having so much fun doing that work!

Sometimes the editors or authors write the tip sheets themselves, which makes my life a lot easier (although I occasionally have to make minor — or major — changes to the text so that it suits the needs of a tip sheet more closely). For example, Amanda Jernigan, the person who selected the poems for the upcoming Essential Richard Outram, wrote the tip sheet for that book and I made very, very few changes to it. John Slater, the poet behind our upcoming collection Surpassing Pleasure, also wrote his own tip sheet, and again, I made very few changes (an unrelated problem is that right now, at five pages, it’s a little on the short side, so I’m hunting down people who may want to write short blurbs or endorsements to beef the tip sheet up a little).

The most fun tip sheet for me has been Jon Evans’s Beasts of New York, a novel that is nearly impossible to categorize but what I’ve hesitantly settled on calling an ‘urban fantasy adventure’. Beasts of New York is a violent, epic, action-packed urban quest full of very eccentric, often hilarious, extremely dangerous characters who also happen to be animals — the wildlife of New York City, to be exact.

Like I said, hard to describe.

But that’s what makes it so much fun. Is this book for adults? Teens? Mystery lovers? Nerds who love sci-fi and fantasy? Personally I think all of the above, but the tip sheet needs to make very clear what this book is and who will want it, so it’s been an awesome challenge trying to write promotional material that reflects how great and genre-bending the book is while at the same time pinpointing its audience and its proper shelf in a bookstore.

I have a lot more to say about Beasts of New York because there are several other very unique things about it (most interestingly, it’s been available for free online since 2007), but that will have to wait until another blog. I have to save some topics for those busy weeks in France, after all.

Until next time,

— Caleigh Minshall

August 10, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
More victory! More dances!

Big news today! We finally received confirmation from the Canada Book Fund that I will, in fact, continue my paid internship until March 31, 2011. I have a big two-four of Heineken in my trunk as a special thank-you to the Inksters for agreeing to put up with me with another year. This is especially exciting for me considering this is a grant on top of the OMDC grant we found out about last week, which allows me to work on PQL’s digital marketing.

Speaking of digital marketing, I just revamped PQL’s fabulous Facebook fanpage — so fabulous it deserves alliteration, obviously — and you can check it out, subscribe to it or just plain ‘like’ it by clicking here. Feel free to post your own comments, ideas, wants, needs, hatreds, etc. I’ll do my best to respond to all of it in good time and good cheer! (That last part depends entirely on whether I’ve inserted my coffee IV in the morning.)

I’m already starting to plan out the upcoming year so that I’ll be ready when my grant-supported internship begins on September 1. The tasks outlined for the Canada Book Fund application are, for the most part, straight-forward and familiar (writing tip sheets and catalogue copy; preparing bibliographic information for the LPG sales conference; etc.) — but the OMDC’s digital marketing objectives are a little trickier, and to be honest, CBF won’t be a piece of cake either. For one thing, I need to up my blog viewing rate to 100 unique visitors per month! For the OMDC, I need to figure out how to add a comments feature to this blog; create reading and recommendation lists to draw more attention to our (fabulous [PQL word of the day, apparently]) backlist; organize author interviews and other bonus features to draw more readers to our site; and optimize our search feature for searches by topic/genre. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of big projects here, and keep in mind that I’ll also be working on these while living in France and teaching at a local high school.

Of course, there’s no need to worry. I wouldn’t be me if I weren’t frantically scribbling a to-do list, so this is all pretty typical for my lifestyle.

This to-do list brings me to my topic of the week: social media. It’s a buzzword, and I hate buzzwords (although I do love adjectives, as evidenced by this post). However, being right in the middle of this generation of young digital addicts, I can truly say that social media is one of the best ways to learn, to reach customers, and yes, even to achieve the challenging results demanded by these grants.

That Facebook page? It’s a great way to connect with fans and tell them about exciting news and events — and also to hear about their exciting news, events, and most importantly their feedback on how I’m doing. Facebook is also how I’ll primarily keep in touch with my publishing colleagues that I met through Simon Fraser University — some of whom have experience in digital marketing and publicity and whose brains I will, hopefully, be able to pick.

Twitter is an even better way for a budding young publisher (possibly like you?) to learn about the industry and to pick up tips for her own job. Although PQL as a company doesn’t have a Twitter account (Twitter tends to suck up massive amounts of time if you let it ...), my own bio on Twitter is ‘Spunky intern at the Porcupine’s Quill’ and I often tweet about PQL books, blogs, events, and daily goings-on at the shop. (If you want to find me, my handle is @caleighminshall). I use Twitter to learn about jobs and career paths I might want to pursue someday and to connect with people in the publishing industry I’d never meet otherwise. It’s a great way to pick up ideas on how to reach out to folks online and I’d say it’s a must-have for anyone thinking of entering the book world (although, future PQL interns, by the time you read this, Twitter will probably be ubiquitous and my raving will seem unnecessary!)

If you’d like to share your own digital marketing and branding strategies, or talk about grants and publishing and life, as always you are welcome to email me. And at some point next year, before March 31, I hope to be able to say: ‘You are welcome to comment!’

— Caleigh Minshall

P.S. I just had to share this hilarious pic: The 2010 Map of Social Networking. Enjoy!

August 4, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Victory dances

When the proofs of Walker’s Book of Hours were returned in the mail a few weeks ago, it was easy as pie to input Doris and George’s corrections. Granted, this was partly because most of the book is in image — hard to make a typo when you’re dealing with art — but still. Easy. Pie. What’s not to love?

Over the weekend, Kaleidoscope’s proofs came back in the mail ... and it was quite a lot less pretty than Book of Hours, let me tell you! Doris and Zailig had taken, not a pen, but a flaming red sword to the pages, and I’ve spent the last two days fixing and changing and updating. It seems as if I celebrated too soon when I put the first round of proofs in the mail at the beginning of the summer!

I’m consoling myself with the fact that Kaleidoscope was my first hack at typesetting on the job (other than Book of Hours, which is, as I said, made up mostly of artwork). Three months ago I didn’t know that glosas have to go on facing pages (now I do), or that en-dashes, not hyphens, signify series of numbers (e.g. ‘1999—2000,’ not ‘1999-2000’). I also console myself with the fact that there was some miscommunication, not entirely my fault, that led to some of the other errors; the manuscript I consulted for formatting was not, in fact, the most accurate manuscript! But there are some problems that just fall squarely on my shoulders — missing italics, incorrect line or page breaks, etc. Hopefully the next proofs that come back in the mail will be a little better off — consider Kaleidoscope my practice run — but the real moral of the story is that there’s no such thing as perfect. Oh, and also that there can never be too much copyediting.

But after two days of fixing mistakes, formatting images, re-paginating four galleys, and generally getting intimate with the vi line-editor, I finally finished right at the end of the work day. I still have to print all of the proofs and double-check my fixes (I’d hate to introduce more errors!), and of course I still have to update the page numbers in the title and first line index (you know, after re-paginating four galleys) ... but, well, I’m still giving my back a well-deserved pat. What seemed disastrous at first (‘You have a ton of work to do,’ Tim announced — perhaps, dare I say it, gleefully) is now an excuse for celebration and victory dances!

That is, until this second round of proofs is returned in the mail ...

In other, less exciting news, I’m finally hard at work on the portfolio required for admission by Simon Fraser’s MPub and Centennial College’s Book + Magazine publishing program. Although I’ve learned a lot about the Porcupine’s Quill’s way of designing books, I’m still not very good at it — so I’m creating my portfolio on InDesign. Eventually I’ll have a pdf version and I’ll try to remember to post it up on Scribd so everyone can see (and give feedback!).

Until next time,

— Caleigh Minshall

July 30, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Home, sweet home

I’ve been back at the Quill for a week now, and boy have I missed it! The routine, the sanity, the coffee and pastry breaks — Vancouver, you were awesome, but home is best. I’ve realized that I’m a creature of habit. Routine makes me happy.

It was nice to see (almost all of) the regulars at the Quill again — Elke was away for the week, but I’ll see her on Tuesday after the long weekend.

Of course, being back at the Quill also means being back to work. One of our titles for Spring 2011 is an edition of Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by George A. Walker’s wood engravings — which he made as a student many years ago for Bill Poole’s first Canadian edition of Alice! I’ve spent the last three days typesetting all of four chapters. It is a lot harder than just placing poetry on a page like I had been doing for The Essential Richard Outram, for example. Alice is almost like Tetris: you have to fit George’s engravings in exactly the right place, lined up with exactly the right text. Fun, but challenging.

Although I’m a long way from finished, the most challenging part so far has been re-creating ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ from chapter three (which you can see here). At the Quill we don’t use a WYSIWYG design program like InDesign; all of our typesetting is done in a line-editor called vi, and then we render the combination of tags and text into a pdf. (I may be getting the technical terms here completely wrong, so check back for updates.) This means that when I’m placing the image on the page, I can’t actually ‘see’ what I’m doing — I’m just specifying codes and measurements that will, after I’ve saved and rendered the file, hopefully display the way I want. This leads to a lot of surprises in pdf format, especially since I’m still pretty unfamiliar with the terminology and units of measurement (twelve points to a pica, six [! — not twelve like I originally wrote] picas to an inch ...). I think I’ve already improved a lot over the past two days, but it was really slow going at first.

Here is an example of the code I used to make ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ (although I don’t have the actual file with me, so the pica measurements may not be reflective of what I actually did):

[14m]\s-1‘Let us[ql]
[13m][n]both go[ql]
[13m]to law:[ql]
[12m][n][i]I[r] will[ql]
[11m][n]prosecute[ql]
[11m][i]you[r].[ql]
[11m][t][t]\s-1Come, I’ll[ql]
[12m]take no[ql]
[12m][n]denial;[ql]

Each of the ‘m’s signifies a space the width of an ‘m’, so the first line, for example, has fourteen ‘m’s worth of space before it. The ‘n’ represents a space the size of an ‘n’, obviously, and is half the size of an ‘m’. ‘ql’ means ‘quad left’, which aligns the line to the left and also breaks the line off. \s-1 changes the text to one point size smaller than what it used to be. The tough part with making the Tale was, of course, the fact that I had to guess what the sizes were and then render it to see what it actually looked like. I had to go back and forth several times between the vi file and the pdf before I got the spacing right. Now, I’m happy to say, ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ looks a lot like the original!

Before I enjoy the rest of my long weekend, I have some other happy news to share: funding has been confirmed to support my continued (albeit virtual) work for the Quill while I’m in France, particularly work on digital marketing. Luckily I made a friend at SFU whose specialty is in digital marketing, so I’m hoping to pick up some tips from her!

— Caleigh Minshall

July 26, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Report from SFU Publishing Immersion, pt. 2 (I’m home!)

Last night I finally returned to good old Caledon, Ontario. It was nice to go to bed without worrying about the hooligans partying outside (my Vancouver hotel was right in the downtown core). But I still found myself missing the wild, high-pressure challenges of the SFU workshop! Truly, it would be too much to summarize the entire two weeks in one blog post. The whole thing was a whirlwind of emotions and experiences and information — often contradictory. If you have specific questions and find yourself wondering what the workshop is like and whether it’s for you specifically, don’t hesitate to email me and I’d be happy to answer them.

But that’s not very helpful on a public blog! What I can do is say that for me, personally, I had a blast and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in publishing — especially if you’re enjoying an internship at the time, since a little background in publishing (and writing copy!) was very helpful to me and made finishing projects a little easier. The hours are long and the breaks are short, but I didn’t find that too troubling, although some other people did. Like I said in my last blog, though, the hardest part is really just figuring out a way to get along with your group. After the first two rocky days, I had settled in pretty well with my group and now can say that I am really! truly! proud to have worked so hard with them and produced our fabulous catalogue (more on that later), but one person quit midway through the workshop and there were plenty of other snits and tantrums and fights — all understandable when you think of the long hours, short breaks, and little time to sleep. How to deal with all of that?

The first thing to do is to figure out your priority. Is your priority to make as many friends and connections as possible, like mine was? Because if that’s the case, you need to swallow that ego and refuse to get involved in any unreasonable arguments and be willing to compromise on things you may feel quite passionate about. You may even want to skimp on the project work and instead spend more time socializing with your peers. Is your priority to impress the faculty members? If so, you may want to be more forceful about creating the best list possible and spend more time on your own perfecting that list, even if your group might not be as dedicated.

Part of my group’s working agreement was to remember that we are all role-playing and none of this is real life. I think that’s so important to remember. We’re here to learn, have fun, make mistakes, and get feedback on those mistakes from people who know this industry far better than we do. Ditch the ego. Don’t get attached to any title ideas, because chances are your group will hate it (and if they don’t, the faculty will). Be creative and fearless! Volunteer to do things that you aren’t familiar with so that you can gain some experience in new areas. Support your fellow group members and don’t belittle them, no matter how much they may frustrate you or how terrible their ideas are. (I’m happy to report that my group members only came up with the most brilliant ideas, so I didn’t have too much trouble there.) A cheerful attitude is so important to maintain, for your own health and others’. If that means you need to step out the room, do so — better to take a ten-minute breather than burn out and rampage for half an hour. A couple different people took breathers in my group and everyone was better for it, and I think our willingness to take care of each other helped not only our sanity but the quality of our work.

I’ve come away with some genuine friends and contacts for when I return from France in 2011. I also had a blast — the Saturday night boat cruise was such a fabulous party to finish off the workshop! Sometime this week I hope to upload my photos to a Flickr account; I’ll be sure to post the link. There are too many photos, and to be honest none of them are good enough, for me to post here.

As for Robson House’s seven (imaginary) titles, here they are: Outside the Noise, a ‘vulnerable and revelatory’ autobiography by Michaelle Jean; Heartbeat, a compassionate look at one man’s odyssey through the hospital and through memories of his father, written by Ian Brown; I Ate Precious, an outrageous and hilarious book ‘with a chaser of inspiration’ by celebrity Trey Anthony; Otherhood, edited by Anne Kingston, which is a series of conversations by twenty Canadian icons (from Kim Cattrall to Roberta Bondar) on their decision to live a childless, fulfilling life; The Science of Snow, and Other Cold Hard Facts About Winter, a quirky, informative book all about winter by Bob McDonald of Quirks & Quarks fame; and ... two more titles I can’t tell you about, because one of our group members may be publishing them in the near future!

That was one long sentence, eh? Despite all the stress of the first two weeks, everyone’s titles came together beautifully. The final sales conference on Saturday morning was a lot of fun and also inspirational — the ideas and book covers were all so wonderful, almost miraculously so, considering the stress of the previous two weeks.

Looks like I owe you another blog this week, since I missed last week altogether. As always, don’t hesitate to email me with questions!

— Caleigh Minshall

July 18, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Report from SFU Publishing Immersion, pt. 1 (I’m alive!)

I’ve now been at the Publishing Immersion at Simon Fraser University for a whole week. And wow, where to begin! It is even more exhausting than they say on the website. This is the first spare moment I’ve had to even sit down and write a blog! But the exhaustion is totally worthwhile, and in fact I’ve found that the more difficult aspect is the group work (and the group dynamics). Five to six hours of sleep every night, with days that run from 8:30am to at the very least 10:00pm (but more often until 11:00pm, or on one memorable occasion 12:30am) — well, let’s just say people get cranky! You learn a lot about how to work under stress and how to manage group time wisely. And, of course, you also learn a lot about publishing.

Maybe it would help if I started with this year’s participants’ demographics. I had no idea what to expect when I first started packing for the immersion last weekend. Would people be my age? What kind of jobs would they have? What are their backgrounds? Well, there are only four men out of 24 participants, for one thing. At 21 I’m also the youngest person in the workshop by at least (I think) a couple of years. It seems as if my fellow participants can be split into two groups of people: people in their mid-twenties who are trying to get into the industry (and may work at bookstores, small internet start-ups, or something entirely unrelated), and then there is a group of people who are 28+ years old who are either already well-established in the industry as editors and general managers or have significant experience in related industries like design or technology. There are, of course, exceptions; there are at least a few people over 40 who have less experience in publishing than some of the 30-year-olds. Overall, though, this two-group-split seems an accurate way of understanding who comes to the immersion. The dress code is casual, but not too casual, because many of the speakers are the big wigs that (some) participants are trying to impress — so you need to look pretty sharp! Some speakers are also some of the participants’ bosses, which heaps even more pressure on those people to perform. Then again I haven’t seen anyone at all wearing sweatpants in Vancouver, so maybe that’s just a local thing.

For me, the best part of this workshop so far has been the candid honesty of speakers and of fellow participants. Speakers use case studies involving real, recognizable people and companies (protected under the immersion’s ‘cone of silence,’ a term coined by Kristin Cochrane, publisher of Doubleday Canada). The speakers are often unafraid to express their own misgivings about the future of publishing and their own experiments in digital marketing and technologies. In fact, many of our speakers contradict each other ...! But that’s part of why I’m having so much fun: there are no easy answers, nobody seems to have a clear vision of what publishing may look like in fifteen years, and in many ways our — the participants’ — ideas about the future of publishing seem as likely a possible outcome as everyone else’s predictions.

I won’t talk about who has spoken, because the entire faculty list (with bios!) is available on the SFU website. I will say that without exception each faculty member has been approachable, kind and extremely well-qualified to teach us — and they all had amazing ideas, too (although I didn’t always agree with them). However, I’ve also discovered that there is just as much value in learning from my fellow participants, if not more value (because the chances of my becoming an editorial or marketing person is much more likely than my becoming the CEO of Simon & Schuster, ha). For example, Julie Forrest (@jforrest on Twitter) works at Random House Canada in digital marketing, and she is one of the participants at the immersion — and I had also been following her on Twitter for months before even considering attending the workshop. Four of the participants are from Harlequin; they’ve been nicknamed the Harlequin Girls and they are all completely lovely. One woman is an assistant editor at Doubleday Canada (I may be getting her title wrong). Another is in marketing at New Society Publishers of D&M, and yet another is a publicist at Simon & Schuster. One of the men works at NeWest Press. I think another one of the men, whom I haven’t spoken with as much, works with a French publishing house in Quebec. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, too. Some of these people I’ve had the chance to sit down with for some time, and learning about their jobs, what they do from day to day, and simply how much they love their career has been worth all the hard work. There are many people here whom I will definitely be keeping in touch with after I leave.

The other half of the immersion, apart from the speakers, is the simulated publishing house that we run in our groups of six. My house is called Robson House. Each group is given a company profile; ours is that we are the Canadian branch plant of a huge multinational publisher, but that although we were once regarded as a ‘powerhouse of Canadian nonfiction,’ in recent years our titles have lacked focus and direction and we are now, sadly, haemorrhaging cash. Our task? To renew our relationships with prominent authors and agents and create a list that will begin to recover our old prestige — a list that will also turn a tidy profit, without any help from our multinational Mom and Dad. Each house has their own profile, but the common thread is that we each need to create a list of seven original titles (mainly nonfiction) and write TIs (Title Information sheets), P&Ls (Profit and Loss sheets), costing sheets, print specs, marketing plans, catalogue copy, and ... well, that’s as far as we’ve gotten, so I’m not too sure what happens next week. We receive our assignment at around 5pm and it is technically due at 10pm, but more often than not everyone needs an extra one to three hours to complete everything — particularly because the faculty members often scrap title ideas after most of the work has been completed for them. Our group fortunately only had to redo three titles early on in the week based on faculty feedback; other groups, I’ve heard, have been forced to scrap 6+ titles over the course of several days before they found a list that the faculty loved.

I could go on for another 1000 words about group dynamics, digital opportunities and making the most of your experience here, but I think I’ll end with this for now: It’s been an amazing experience and I’d recommend it to anyone, and no matter how tired you are, never turn down a night on the town! If you’re interested in more detailed updates, you can also follow the workshop’s progress on Twitter using the hashtag #SPW.

— Caleigh Minshall

July 8, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
SFU-flavoured ice cream

Dear reader(s?): I have a confession to make. For the past two weeks I withheld important information from you. You may have thought that life at the Quill was business as usual, that nothing was out of the ordinary, that Elke, Tim, Jill, and I were working our butts off from Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30 — just like always. Well, although that assumption is mostly correct, you would be wrong in one key area: Tim and Elke were actually relaxing their butts off in Italy, celebrating their fortieth anniversary! They only returned last Thursday evening, and Monday was our first day all in the shop together again.

(How was their trip? They tell me: Excellent.)

While they were gone I was responsible for checking and responding (where I could) to Tim’s email, picking up the mail every day, finishing up as much work as possible, making sure Cho-Cho and Lee-Lee weren’t too lonely, and, of course, keeping nasty burglars away by slyly avoiding any mention of the Inksters’ absence on the internet. Future interns, beware: Tim’s email is much more ferocious than any possible burglar. May you never have to deal with it. Some days it took an hour before I could get to my regular job. Of course, I can’t complain too much; my blog- and Twitter-following tells me that deluges of email is common in publishing, so I had better get used to it.

This week I’ve finished my part for the proofs of Eric Ormsby’s Fine Incisions (now it’s Tim’s job to finish it), and Helwig’s Mystery Stories also got sent off to Doris the editor. A couple of days ago I got started on typesetting a Spring 2011 title, The Essential Richard Outram, selected by Amanda Jernigan (former PQL intern!) — we haven’t even written catalogue copy for it yet, but we have the complete manuscript and, likely because Amanda once worked here too, she has made it ridiculously easy to typeset (consistent, no funny symbols, the poems fit the pages — easy peasy!). I’ll be done before I know it.

On Saturday the Doors Open: Erin Village event happens, which is pretty exciting considering all of the publicity work I put into it while T&E were away. The weather is supposed to be perfect so we hope that there will be a decent turn-out for the guided walking tours, performances, etc. that will be going on all day. Today Tim had his hour in the spotlight — or rather, on the radio, since the visited the morning show on Erin Radio for a chat, just like I did a couple weeks ago.

I won’t be at Doors Open, though. On Sunday I fly out to Vancouver for SFU’s Publishing Immersion, and that means Saturday will be spent packing clothes and purses (not sure what to wear), printing tickets and maps (not sure where to go), painting my toenails (sandal weather), and possibly — probably — hyperventilating. Actually, to be honest, I am super excited and have been looking forward to this all summer. I hope to learn tons and to make a lot of friends — and also to get some tips on what I should do post-France: graduate school, or work?

For you future interns, I’ll also give you at least one highly-detailed scoop on the program. Maybe even two. (Can you tell I’m eating ice cream?)

— Caleigh Minshall

June 30, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Puzzles

I felt like a professional puzzle-solver this week. I’ve told you before about our sixteen-page signatures, which mean that any book the Quill publishes needs to be a multiple of sixteen. Well, I’ve just finished typesetting two of our books — Mystery Stories by David Helwig and Fine Incisions by Eric Ormsby — and, whaddaya know, they both end up with horridly awkward page numbers that are decidedly not multiples of sixteen. Fine Incisions came out to 262 pages, while Mystery Stories came out to 266 pages — both of which are almost right in the middle of sixteen signatures (256 pp.) and seventeen (272 pp.) What’s a porcupette to do?

Well, I’ve come up with a few ideas, with Eric and David’s help. Mystery Stories was originally split into three sections, with a novella at the end. David and I decided we could make the novella its own section. Thus, an extra two pages, for the section title page to announce the start of the novella. Then we had another idea: a dedication. Another two pages. Now we’re at 270 pp., but that still leaves two more pages to fit in somewhere to make the book work. Where do they come in? I decided to insert a full blank page (both sides) before the author biography at the end of the book. The problem is that Tim wasn’t in the shop today, and so I couldn’t double-check that decision with him. I’ll find out soon whether it’s back to the drawing board with that one ...

Fine Incisions is a little trickier, because we wanted to cut six pages (to get to 256 pp.) instead of add ten (to get to 272 pp.). Originally Fine Incisions was divided into seven sections; each of those sections got a title page in the book. I suggested to Eric and Carmine Starnino, his editor, that perhaps we could change the number of sections. Carmine suggested four; Eric preferred three; and now Eric is thinking about a way to gracefully categorize his essays in only three sections. If we reduce the number of sections to only three instead of seven, that will mean we get to 254 pp. — and it’s not too hard to find two more pages to add somewhere!

On an entirely new note, I finally took the photos of the Inksters’ backyard that I promised so many posts ago. It was a beautiful day outside (although pretty cold) and I got a few pretty shots of where I eat my lunch every day. Take a look:

    My lunch room at the Porcupine’s Quill. June, 2010.

    The amazing view of the river. Beneath the willow tree on the right is where the muskrats keep their home.

And finally, I have another backlist gem to share. Kenji and the Cricket, written by Adele Wiseman and illustrated by Shiyuze Takashima, was published in 1988, the same year I was born. And although my mom (who is in the kitchen behind me) tells me that she doesn’t remember the book, I swear that somewhere, somehow, that book was read to me when I was very small. I got another good look at it when we recently donated some copies to a local kids’ charity, and it’s a beautiful little story. Our web page on it is a little sparse at the moment, since the title is so old, but hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have updated our website with all of our legacy information and you can see all the nice things people have said about Kenji.

Happy (almost) Canada Day! Here’s to civil liberties! (Oh, wait ...)*

— Caleigh Minshall

*In reference to the G20 fiasco of last weekend. Yikes.

June 24, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Fame and fortune

Today was very exciting. Remember that publicity campaign for Doors Open I told you about last week? Well, my emails paid off and this morning I visited Erin Radio (101.5 FM) for what I thought would be a quick interview, but was actually a whole hour of chatting live on the radio about the upcoming Doors Open, the news and our favourite ways to drink coffee. At first I was really nervous, but the host, Erin Montgomery, and Ethan the intern really made me feel right at home. I hardly even noticed that everything I said was being broadcast to our whole community. I had such a great time that I’m now considering making the switch from publishing to radio.

(Just kidding.)

On Friday we also received our proofs of Book of Hours in the mail — newly notated by editor Doris Cowan. I finally got to open it and read over Doris’s comments yesterday afternoon. And wow, so much effort and detail goes into editing! For example, Doris had circled the word ‘regimental’ in George’s preface to the book. ‘Regimental routine’, the text read. At first I was confused. I didn’t, of course, think that Doris had made a mistake (Tim tells me she pretty much never does), but I didn’t get the problem. Doris’s note explained everything. Did you know that ‘regimental’ actually refers specifically to the military — as in, military-like — and that the word we actually wanted was ‘regimented’? I never would have noticed it as an editor. (Well, I will now.) There were a couple other examples like that, too. ‘Peruse’ versus ‘read’ versus ‘scan’ — all have different nuances. ‘Mindless’ versus ‘thoughtless’ versus, what we finally decided on, ‘self-complacent’ (which has a whole different tone, but we thought it was more accurate). Wild, right? Doris also has to do all of the fact-checking, which in the case of Book of Hours meant double-checking all of the author names, book titles and publication dates cited in the introduction and preface.

I’ve been reading up on copyediting in particular in a book called The Copyeditor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn. Although it has an American focus, Einsohn does make sure to indicate important disagreements between American and British/Canadian style. I’m about a third of the way through the book, and my god — it’s complicated! (But Einsohn makes it a lot of fun anyway.) I can tell by the exercises that I’m improving a lot, so hopefully by the end of the summer I won’t be so overwhelmed by Doris’s detailed notation.

Finally, a long time ago I promised to feature some backlist beauties as I discovered them while updating our new website and creating ‘Buy’ buttons on AbeBooks. Well, I found one! (I’ve found lots, actually, but I thought this one was neat.) The Crown Prince Waits for a Train is a chapbook of poetry by Tim Inkster himself, and is one of only two Porcupine’s Quill publications from the 70s available in the original edition and at the original price. It’s thirty-two pages and (best of all?) the price, if you can believe it, is just $2.95. For a new copy! One of the poems was featured the 1975 edition of the Penguin Book of Canadian Verse.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ve already finished most of my pre-workshop assignment for the Publishing Immersion, although I think that means I should go over it again and make sure everything makes sense. All that’s left (apart from review) is to write up the P&Ls and costing sheets for each of the five book ideas I came up with. An English lit. major doing math? Watch for explosions, folks.

— Caleigh Minshall