On Publishing, Page Layout, and Busy-ness

I’m finally getting back to blogging, and even a little of my own writing on other subjects. I thought I’d comment on what has been going on here that kept me away from my blogs for so long. I note that my post Why I Am Blogging Less was published on May 6, so that’s a bit over a month, but my blogging was fairly sparse for a month before that.

No, there have been no family disasters, nor have I been out climbing mountains. It has all related to business. Two years ago my company, Energion Publications, was a one person operation, and even for that one person (me) it was part time. Since then, we have had quite an explosion of activity. As of June 1, there are two people working full time with the company and two working part time, plus a few tasks, such as cover design, that we contract out. My wife Jody has joined me full time.

For the first five years of this company’s existence we published an average of four books per year. During the past year we added more than ten. We used to work on one book at a time, now we have books already scheduled for completion in 2011. In fact, we only have enough space left in our 2010 schedule for a couple of books, and the only reason that space is left open is that we’ve been holding it open for special projects.

This is what took me out of the loop for a couple of months. I did the page layout work on three books that have already been released, The Character of Our Discontent, Soup Kitchen for the Soul, and Along Bible Paths: Summer Devotions, and on one additional book’s advance copies, the paperback edition of Preserving Democracy.

I had to learn some new software. For those interested, we’re now doing page layout with a combination of Scribus, LaTex, and Lyx. For those who may not be aware, Scribus is an open source desktop publishing system. It does many things well on its own, but one important feature is the ability to include elements from LaTex. Lyx is a document processor which, put very briefly, is a sort of cross between WYSIWYG word processing and the text coded layout. It can produce LaTex files, amongst others. I won’t go into detail on why I’m using this combination, but getting used to the setup has been an interesting and worthwhile learning experience.

I almost forgot to mention that I had the truly odd experience of creating the covers for two of these books working via phone and e-mail with the designer. He had no computer available to do the layout, and I am not great at visual things, to put it mildly. He gave me directions, I’d do the layout, and then e-mail him a jpeg of the result. Those two books are The Character of Our Discontent (image lower right in this post), and Along Bible Paths (image top left in this post).

I’ve already written about The Character of Our Discontent, but I will post reflections on the other three books and on several more that are coming up soon. I simply haven’t had the time to reflect a great deal, much less to write my reflections on the blog. There is a bottleneck of books on which work is progressing, but for which I don’t have press releases and catalog entries created. So watch for lots of new material coming from Energion Publications.

While I’m still busy, I think 16 hour days are largely a thing of the past, and I will also have more time for some of the things I enjoy more, such as blogging and keeping in contact with authors and readers, not to mention my own reading.

(I’m linking this post to my most recent post on the Participatory Bible Study blog and on The Jevlir Caravansary so readers of those blogs can catch the explanation for my absence. Doubtless they’ve been waiting impatiently for my next words! More likely, not so much!)