Author
Benito Olson
Publisher
Ballast Books
Genre
Military memoir
Dimensions
6" x 9"
Pages
259
Ink and Paper
Standard black-and-white on white paper with color insert
Overview
The Underdogs: Conquering Life with Man's Best Friend and SEAL Team ----- is a military memoir written by USN (Ret.) Chief Petty Officer Benito Olson, portraying his time training and working alongside the canine soldiers in special ops groups. He published the book through Ballast Books, who commissioned me for the formatting, typesetting, and ebook conversion work.
Objectives
and Goals
and Goals
This project was mostly straightforward, but with a couple of twists: “The book is 76k words and has an 8-page photo insert with 30 photos total. It is a military memoir and some of the photos on the insert need to have faces blurred, and there are some redactions in the manuscript.” Military reviewers had flagged information on many pages that needed to be censored; the author requested that they be blacked out but that the length of the text should remain the same.
Process
• Determined the heading typeface based on the cover
• Typeset the text
• Formatted the page layouts, including photos
• Adjusted the photos to blur out faces
• Implemented the author’s and publisher’s edits and feedback
• Converted the manuscript to PDF files
• Converted the manuscript to EPUB format
• Formatted the EPUB file to prepare it for e-readers
Challenges
and Solutions
and Solutions
The main challenge was making sure that all the words, phrases, and sentences flagged by the military review were censored completely while still remaining the same length. Just having a black highlight wasn’t enough; the letters had to be uncopyable. To remedy the problem, I replaced every letter and space in the flagged sentence with the “black square” symbol from the typeface Segoe UI Symbols. Then I adjusted the tracking so that there were no gaps between the squares, making it look like there was just a thick black line across the page where text used to be.
When I converted the InDesign manuscript to EPUB format, I tagged all the groups of black squares as <span> and gave them the class of “blackout,” which I designed to have a completely black background with a thin white border to differentiate the censored content from any dark e-reader backgrounds.
Tools
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Acrobat
• Sigil
• Kindle Previewer
Deliverables
• Guts (interior content) PDF
• Guts PDF in spreads (to portray the layout of the printed book better)
• EPUB
• Packaged and compressed folder with INDD, IDML, link, and font files
Results
and Impact
and Impact
• 100% of the Amazon reviews are 5 stars.
Reflection
I’ve never come across another book that used the kind of censoring method that this author requested. It definitely adds an element of mystery to the reading experience.
This is one of the books I’m most proud to say I helped with. When my little sister wanted to become a Navy SEAL (she has now moved on to wanting to be an engineer), I told her I had worked on a book written by someone who worked with Navy SEALs, and she was impressed and wanted to read it sometime. Maybe I’ll get it for her birthday or Christmas.
