The Next America: Moving Beyond a Fragile Economy by Don Holbrook

Sorry for the long absence. I have had quite a few projects on my plate—and still do. My tutorial practice has been usurped by real-world experience, so I'm not complaining. I would like to post here, however, that at the end of last year The Unbound Bookmaker produced a complete book, entitled The Next America: Moving Beyond a Fragile Economy.

I worked with the author, Don Holbrook, from start to finish. He gave me the raw manuscript, and I first did the ghostwriting. Since this is a political book, and he and I have different political opinions and philosophies, I had to be very careful that I kept my voice and my opinions out of the book. We worked for several months on the manuscript, with many emails and reviews going back and forth.

Next came the proofreading, which was done by Suzy Bills. She picked up everything that I left behind. Always important to have someone look over your work. She did an excellent job. I then, with input from the author, designed the interior of the book (no small matter) as well as the cover. The cover was the most enjoyable part—I started with a picture of an Easter egg, digitally painted a flag on it, and used two cement textures to create a 3D room. The cracked $ has the Bevel effect applied to it and has a cracked texture mapped onto it; the stand's ends I made from rasterized and distorted periods. The shadow was particularly difficult to figure out since the 3D wall creates to different angles of shadows. And finally, when the typesetting was just about complete, Rachel Chase did the indexing, a very difficult skill that I don't think is appreciated enough.

We then made the book available on Amazon. Clicking on the book will take you to the Amazon page where you can take a look inside at the interior. Since I have not expanded into the eBook industry yet, Don has taken up the Kindle eBook production himself, so I didn't have any input there. I hope this year to expand in that direction, however. Thanks, Don, Suzy, and Rachel, for a very valuable experience!

Don is doing two other books with us (to be revealed later) and I am producing my grandmother's personal history, editing a technical textbook, and typesetting a brochure. Very enjoyable projects.