You Can Tell Edits

Not for sale

Author

Sandra Grey

Original
Publisher

Covenant Communications

Genre

Historical suspense and romance

Dimensions

6” x 9” + bleed

Pages

496

Ink and Paper

Standard color on white paper

Overview

Traitor is an adult historical suspense and romance novel written by Sandra Grey and originally published by Covenant Communications in 2008. It won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2009, beating out works by popular authors like Jessica Day George, Stephanie Black, and Brandon Sanderson. As Sandra Grey’s daughter, I was there when she won that award, and after the ceremony, I was next to her when Covenant’s senior editor Kirk Shaw told her, “You’re one of our best writers.”

Since Sandra became a single mother, she hasn’t been able to get another novel published yet, and throughout the years I could tell that she was disappointed by this. So for one of my final projects before I graduated from BYU, I decided to give her first book, Traitor, a “special edition” treatment of sorts. I got permission from Covenant to use the text from her book and print only one or two copies. I didn’t tell my mom what I was doing, but I asked if she could send me her manuscript in Word format. She did, but she wasn’t able to send me the final draft, only an earlier one, so grammar issues and typos do exist in this version. Since this redesign was only for a school project, and I needed only a certain number of hours, I decided not to re-edit the book.

Objectives
and Goals

My main objectives with this project were to (1) create a nice-looking redesign of the book that would fit in the current historical suspense market, (2) experiment a bit with color, typography, etc., (3) print the book as a hardcover, since Sandra’s original book was only released in paperback, audiobook, and e-book, and (4) surprise my mom with this edition.

Process

• Designed the full cover

• Typeset the text

• Formatted the page layouts, including graphics

• Added graphics to some of the blank or featured pages

• Converted the manuscript to PDF files

• Uploaded the cover and interior PDFs to Lulu.com

• Marked the book as private on Lulu.com

• Ordered 2 copies

Challenges
and Solutions

The biggest challenge that I made for myself was having several different types of aesthetic graphics used on different pages while keeping the style consistent. I wanted to be experimental, but not to make everything too dissimilar. I kept up the consistency in these ways: (1) The title and heading typeface was all the same (Chandler42Regular), and (2) the colors were all the same: black, white, and orange.

Tools

• Adobe InDesign

• Adobe Photoshop

• Adobe Acrobat

• Canva

Deliverables

• Full cover PDF

• Cover mockup PNGs and JPGs

• Guts (interior content) PDF

• Guts PDF in spreads (to portray the layout of the printed book better)

• Printed book

Results
and Impact

• I showed the printed book to my professor and class first. They thought it was awesome, and my professor was particularly impressed, especially when I mentioned it was a surprise for my mom.

• I gave one of the copies to my mom at my graduation party. She literally cried, and she’s been showing it off to friends and relatives since. She says that this gift has increased her motivation to get her next book out.

Reflection

There are definitely things I would change if I were able to give my mom’s book a proper special edition (not one slapped together for a 15-hour school project). For instance, I would do more research into the colors and presets for printing so that the black on the pages came out looking more like black and less like dark-gray. I would probably try to avoid large gradients, since those are often difficult to print correctly. I would make sure to get the final draft of the text. And I would add even more “special” elements, like a dust jacket, foiling, artistic endpapers, maybe a stenciled edge, perhaps photos of historical sites mentioned in the book, and more. And, of course, it would be great to publish that special special edition through Covenant Communications. But overall, it would just be great to see my mom so happy with her book again.