Book typography proposal
A first-time author hired Wordschmidt Consulting to edit his book. Then he asked me to stay on to typeset the book and help him reach self-publication stage with Amazon.
Year: 2022
Client: Independent author
Position: Principal, Wordschmidt Consulting
In 2022, I was hired by a first-time, self-publishing author to edit his instructional book about sales for young professionals and prepare it for publication. We engaged in a long-term process of restructuring the book, pulling out sidebars and callouts to break up the monotony of the text, and adding missing links. When the text was complete, the author invited me to create a proposal for preparing the text for publication, typesetting it, selecting illustrations, working on the cover design, and ensuring the file’s technical specs met requirements for Amazon’s self-publishing arm.
I advised the author to hire an external designer for the cover because it was far outside my scope of expertise. However, I had paginated newspapers and magazines for many years and felt comfortable typesetting the book in InDesign and guiding the author through the design review process.
We began by selecting typefaces. I conducted research into book typefaces online, understanding legibility, type size, an ideal range of words per page, and seeking recommendations on pairing serif and sans serif fonts. I completed this work remotely in Oslo, Norway, where I lived August 2022–July 2023. The author and I would schedule status meetings at 9 p.m. Pacific time/6 a.m. Central European time to accommodate our mutual calendars.
The author is a professional salesman with no experience in marketing, design or branding. I grounded my proposal in ideas about his audience and the tone and voice of his book—extending the brand of the book to its visual expression.
“You have been more than an editor; you are a valuable collaborator and alchemist in your own right. You took an unpolished manuscript and turned it into something worth reading that is helpful to those in sales. Your ability to visualize and then help create this book has been a tremendous gift to me. It has been a joy collaborating with you.”