The Business Jet Engine Blasts Off
Martin Riley began his professional career as a product designer but had a dream, a vision of a business philosophy and ethos that would help any business soar … The Business Jet Engine®. Now, at Falcon we couldn’t help Martin with all his dreams, but we could definitely help him get this one into print and ebook.
Working with Falcon was a delight, Colyn was exceptionally patient and diligent, and, despite working to a very tight time-scale, persisted with us until we got a book design we were delighted with. Colyn also helped us source and liaise with printers until we had first editions in our hands. I highly recommend them’
Martin Riley, The Business Jet Engine
Creating the book design
Martin came to us with a complete digital manuscript, containing diagrams and pictures. He had an idea of how he wanted his finished book to look and, once we had established the page size and book format he was after, the next step was to get the design in Martin’s head onto paper.
The first sample we created was very much based on our years of experience with instructional-type books. A traditional serif font was used for the body text and combined with basic borders for information boxes. A good place to start but not what Martin had in mind.
After several attempts, playing with different font and layout types, we supplied a new sample that instantly had the look Martin was after. Clean and crisp, with an almost ‘instruction manual’ look. A sans serif font was used for the body text and the boxes were now defined tinted blocks with some of the text dropped out of the panels. The headings were now much punchier which really added extra impact to the look of the page.
The first draft
Once the page design was agreed the next stage was to run the text into page and supply a set of first proofs. Since this was a slightly complicated design with several different styles a fair bit of time was taken to ensure tables and pictures appeared in the correct place in the text and Martin’s supplied illustrations were clear and would print correctly.
Proof reading
A set of proofs was supplied for Martin to ‘mark-up’ with corrections and then, once these had been made, a fresh set was created for our professional readers to pick through. Their remit is to ensure the book reads well. Checking for literals and hyphenation and anything that might not read correctly.
Printing
Once the final corrections had been made and approved it was time to create our (nearly) final PDF and get this to the printer for a proof copy. Within two days we had a sample copy of the book in our hands and were able to check that all was OK.
A couple of minor tweaks were made and a new file supplied to the printer. Within a working week final bound copies were delivered to Martin’s premises. Well within time for the book launch a week later.
eBook and online sales
The final piece in the jigsaw was to create the files to enable Martin to sell The Business Jet Engine® online. An ebook was produced from from the final print file for selling on Amazon.
Amazon also offer a print-on-demand service which Martin was keen to use. For this we needed to create a new print-ready PDF and upload it ready for Amazon to print from.