I thought I knew what was necessary about designing a book, because I designed my book The Cabins of Wilsonia.

That book involved preparing pencil drawings using Photoshop Elements, a few pages of text, all the frontmatter (that’s Book Speak for the pages of a book that are not the main part that normal people read), the backmatter (bet you can figure this one out yourself), the cover, captions and quotations. Oh, and chapter titles, page numbering, and all the little adjustments and details that no one notices in a book unless they are wrong.

A dear friend and author needed help with some photo editing on a book she was writing. I volunteered. It was very fun. Together we improved about 200 photos. This morphed into the actual copyediting of the book. It is pure pleasure to work with my friend.

As we got deeper into the project, I learned that the author and the 3 people who commissioned her to write their story were planning on using an assisted self-publishing company to get the book print-ready.

When I learned how much that would cost them, how many unnecessary extras they had to buy along with the book design, and that price did NOT even include any books, I was appalled.

So, I offered to do it.

Fall down laughing. . .

I’ll carry on tomorrow. For now, I need to take some deep calming breaths, and contemplate matters of peacefulness.