I Need Your Help For My Book – Black or White?

I’m nervous.

You would be able to tell I’m nervous if somehow you could see my laptop’s history. You’d see I have been – for weeks now – continuously flitting to one or more versions of my Sonali book tweaking here, adding a comma there or (as has happened in last twenty-four hours) completely re-landscaping the style.

 

The front cover of Sonali

This is partly because I want this first book to be as good as it can be. Not perfect, you note; I’m no perfectionist and if I was I wouldn’t have chosen a book of photographic memories of Bangladesh as the first book to produce. I’m no photographer and I’ve guessed my way through designing and arranging the pictures. Photographers among you will, I’m sure, cringe. But, for an amateur, I can make it the best I can with my limited resources and expertise. More accurately, I’ve employed the skills of others who have read, critiqued and re-designed it since I started the project to make up for my inadequacies.

Mostly though, I’m procrastinating because I’m terrified of finally making this thing go public. I could really do with the book equivalent of a mortgage adviser telling me precisely which option I should go for. I’m happy doing the creative bit but there’s such a wealth of choice out there for publishing books that I’m too spoilt for choice.

Moreover, this is a photo book and that’s tricky. I’ve tried compressing it and still can’t make it under 5MB which some publishers need. Although this is coming out as an E-book initially (and possibly an app version if I can persuade the software to work) if I want a print version it could be quite expensive for you guys to buy (around £8-15 /$10-20 I think is the set price) whereas I want to make it available for a much cheaper and affordable price so as many people as possible will buy it and so donate to Ria’s cause.

Decisions, decisions…

If any of you have good advice (experienced please, I have enough ‘nice ideas’) to offer about who to publish with then do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll go with one of the two or three I’ve narrowed it down to.

However, sharing my fears and anxieties isn’t the reason for writing today. Oh no.

I need your help with the very final, final, very last, losing the will to live definitely no-more-going-to-be-done-with-it-now decision I have to make. It’s simply this: Black or White?

Sonali being essentially a photo-memoir book has a lot of pictures with small amounts of text on most. I’ve tried to vary where the text goes but for several pictures it will go to the side, above or below. I have two options – either black text on white background or white text on black background.

Take a look and see what you think. Don’t worry too much about the quality of the text – it looks better in the pdf/e-book format than it does on wordpress (at least on my screen anyway). Just concentrate on the overall feel of the pages.

Here’s an example:

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Which do you guys prefer? Here’s another example:

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So let me know. Which looks better for an E-book and for a printed book? Could be the same answer for both. Could be either would work. What do you think?

Leave your comments here on the blog and once I’ve sifted through them I’ll make a decision and then…publish!

There’s still time, by the way, to click here and go to Ria’s GoFundMe site (or click on the link at the top right of this page) and donate a few pennies, dollars, pounds (or thousands thereof 😉 ) and see your name in lights. Well… Have your name in the acknowledgements of Sonali in both e-book and print version anyway. If that kind of publicity really isn’t your thing don’t worry – you can donate without giving your name publicly on the GoFundMe site (I’ll know who you are but no one else – even Ria – will know) and I will contact you before publishing to ask if you are happy for your name to feature in the acknowledgements. The amount you give will not be published in Sonali.

Thanks for your advice and support, guys. (bloggers – please share, tweet and reblog!) 🙂

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