Mar
7
A journey to a book ~ Part 20
Filed Under A journey to a book
Being the twentieth in a series of posts about a book proposal, from concept to print.
Click on the category ‘A journey to a book’ in the left sidebar to bring up all of the posts in the series.
After my tech editor Robin had a chance to go through my marked-up ‘first pages’ in depth, she emailed me with a list of questions. I had photographed all of the spreads before I sent them back (cheaper than making color copies, eh what) so I was able to pull up the pages and zoom in to the particular areas she had questions about, and give her my answers and suggestions. She assured me that everything was in great shape.
Here’s a funny thing that emerged at that point. What do you call the part of a cut-out appliqué motif that is going to be turned under? You see it called ‘seam allowance’ a lot. I don’t care for that, because it’s not a seam like in patchwork, and I feel like quilters just call it that for lack of a better term. I’d been using the word ‘margin.’ One of the editors felt that ‘margin’ may be confusing, so I was given the task of choosing another term.
A couple of suggestions that came back were ‘turning allowance’ or ‘turned-under edge.’ I mulled this over, and decided on ‘turning allowance.’ After all… it makes perfect sense! It calls it what it is, and it falls in with ‘seam allowance’ in quilting parlance.
I then commenced a ‘margin hunt’ in the manuscript to find all of the instances of margin in this context, and changed them to turning allowance. Can we coin this as a new convention in quilting terminology please???
A couple days after that, I sent back the text for the CD and the answers to another round of editing questions (that’s right, another round, polishing the fruit at this point). Was this the last round of edits for me?? The book was getting close to going to print! I heard that everyone at Martingale was very excited about the CD.
Karen, the acquisitions editor, had indicated a long time ago that my acknowledgments should have my signature at the bottom. I took a blank piece of paper, signed my first name a bunch of times, picked my favorite one, scanned it, and sent it to Robin to forward to the book designer. How fun! [It came out perfect, looking for all the world as if I had signed that page.]
Here it is. Until next time,
Quilt Puppy Publications & Designs
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2 Responses to “A journey to a book ~ Part 20”
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Turning allowance is a great description of the excess fabric that gets turned under in applique.
*Thank you!* :) Kay