We had a productive but fairly technical chat meeting last night and hammered out some details of how the book will look and calculated again to be sure we can get 150,000 words into 320 pages of an 8x10 trade paperback with nice margins and typography. It is not only doable, I think it will be quite a handsome book!
These decisions are still tentative depending on if the printer has the fonts we chose but we decided (mostly me, I'll admit but I was listening to everyone's input) on 14pt Palatino on a 15pt line for body text with a 3pt space between paragraphs. This is a nice compromise between book appearance and ebook practicality so we don't have to do two different layouts for the two versions. Margins will be about 1 inch, top, bottom and outside with 1.25 for inside margins. This gives about a 70 character line and about 38 lines per page, a heavy load for a 6x9 book but entirely suitable for an 8x10 one.
One of the Helveticas will be used for display font (titles, footnotes, TOC) and other typographic decisions were made but may change as the book develops.
We went over the list of nominations quite lightly, mainly discussing how sorry we were that some of them are clearly too big, or are fanfics, or present problems of acquiring permissions since some of the authors have not been heard from in years. Here's the link to the nominations list as of noon Pacific on Wednesday. http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/25855/bc-v1-nominations-t...
A suggestion was made that we include an In Memoriam page to remember those in the community who have passed on and everyone agreed.
After the chat, Piper and I began going through the nominations to determine actual lengths but decided to program our way out of copying and pasting each story into an editor in order to do a wordcount. The result is that each story now has a wordcount at the bottom, the correct word count even appears when one does a print ready page of a compiled book for a chapterized story. :) The programming took a bit over an hour but then we had to wait half an hour for the server to reboot at 1 a.m. Pacific! LOL.
Next chat meeting? How about 10 a.m. Pacific Sunday morning so our transatlantic contingent can participate?
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
suggestion
Perhaps this sort of project could be made easier in the future if some kind of checkbox were added to the "add fiction" page where an author could give permission to include the story in any published Big Closet collection.
I like that -- but...
I'm going to look into that.
On second thought, that kind of checkbox where many people have access to editing the box would not pass the legal test of being equivalent to a signature. Only a form that is more secure or an email can do that, so, not a binding checkbox but a yes, I'd be willing checkbox, okay, yeah that would work. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I Just finished doing the
I Just finished doing the word counts for all the stories in the mentioned list. The total word count for all the stories combined is: 2,303,036 (That's really close to being a funny number... Someone needs to shave 6 words from their story! :P)
Seems thee quite a few nominations of stories over 100K words, One was over 200K.
-P/KAF/PT
lol
That's a lot of words. I always knew we were a vocal bunch.
Seriously, it's good that there are so many nominations that they total that. Going to be tough choosing here, isn't it?
Maggie
Well you could publish the story called .....
"The Life and Times of the World's Laziest Person".
That has a word count of 0.
Wordcounts
Just finished the 2nd round of wordcounts...
We are now up to: 2,851,200 words nominated, not including stories we couldn't find on the site, or nominations for "Anything by Author X"
=HuGgLeS=
-P/KAF/PT
Poop and more poop!
How'd I get it in my head that today's chatmeeting was at 1 pm PST? Oh well, rhetorical question, I missed it...
~~shrugs, veronica
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.