EXUDE (Part 2)
Authoring and designing my first book, EXUDE, continues 🙏🏽
( Here’s Part 1 in case you want the backstory. )
Though designing EXUDE in Adobe InDesign has been smooth so far, my seamlessness .indd experience has been made possible, in large part, by way of a physical mockup which I created by:
- trimming down paper size to match Amazon KDP’s (with-bleed) specifications;
- and matching EXUDE’s page count to date (which, at the time of my initial mockup, was 160 pages).
See the clip below for a peek at my book mockup 🎥👇🏽
Additional benefits
Having a physical book mockup handy as your working through your writings (and designs) is helpful in other ways beyond supporting creative ideation and layout progress.
The most valuable support has, for me, been that which I’m calling “the book’s experience.”
THE BOOK’S EXPERIENCE is what you feel when holding and reading a book in your hands, but ‘experience’ isn’t limited to a book’s physicality — it also involves AFFECTIVE EXPERIENCE, as in the FEELING you get when you turn the pages, anticipating what’s next, or flipping back to something you saw or want to revisit, and so on.
No software or application in the world can replicate this robust experience in full, period.
One more reason my book mockup’s been instrumental
As the book’s author and not just its designer, having a mockup also allows me to get a better sense of content volume and, in turn, the content limitations.
The vid 🎥 shared above captures this reality for me, at least I hope it does, quite clearly.
Authoring and designing EXUDE continues to be an unfolding adventure.
Of course, I’ve laid out countless publications for clients in the past but this EXUDE project is the first time I’m doing all the content and design work for myself, aka my own publishing purposes. And so I’m learning a lot along the way, not just about self publishing under an independent label (how to get that all going and such) but more specifically about myself, both as a creator and as a creatorpreneur.
But more on those learnings later …
For now, I’m enjoying the whole challenge and can’t wait to share more of it with you in the coming weeks and months.
Yours in creative expression,
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