Pro edition
Volume Plan.
The archive is a website. A book is a multiple of 16 pages with the binding on the right, and getting from one to the other is arithmetic that the chapter list already contains. Spine width in millimetres is pages ÷ 2 × caliper, plus about 1 mm for a perfect-bound cover. It is computed per volume below from the same page counts the archive publishes, which is the entire reason this sheet is worth having: change a chapter length and every number here moves.
Three volumes, computed
| Volume | Chapters | Story pages | Extent | To fill | Spine | Spreads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume 1Signal Check | 5 | 132 | 144 | 8 pp | 7.5 mm | 4 |
| Volume 2Dead Air | 6 | 150 | 160 | 6 pp | 8.2 mm | 3 |
| Volume 3Storm Watch | 8 | 208 | 224 | 12 pp | 11.1 mm | 4 |
- Volume 1 — Signal Check
- Arc 1 whole. The first volume is the one a reader picks up on a table, so it ends where the first broadcast does rather than where the page count would prefer.
- Volume 2 — Dead Air
- Arc 2 whole. The heaviest of the three, and the one whose spine has to be measured rather than guessed.
- Volume 3 — Storm Watch
- Arc 3 as it stands, plus the one-shot as a bonus at the back — which is where a left-to-right story can live inside a right-to-left book without confusing anybody, because it starts from the other cover.
Where the padding goes
In this order. The last rule is the one that costs a book its best drawing when it is broken.
- Front matter
- Half-title, title, copyright, contents. Four pages, always, and they are part of the signature arithmetic rather than an extra.
- Chapter openers
- A chapter that starts on a left-hand page reads as a mistake in a right-to-left book. One blank page moves it, and that blank is where padding goes first.
- Back matter
- Afterword, thumbnails, the tide table gag. This is the elastic: it is what absorbs the last four to twelve pages so the total lands on a multiple of sixteen.
- Never inside a spread
- Padding placed between the two halves of a double-page spread turns the best drawing in the book into two drawings. The archive knows where every spread is; the plan reads it from there rather than from memory.
Five things the printer asks first
Every one of them is answerable from the archive, and every one of them is expensive to answer late. The 3 arcs are already the volume boundaries; nothing else needs deciding.
- Trim size
- B6, 128 × 182 mm. Named before anything else, because it decides the drawing area and the drawing area decides the panel layouts.
- Extent
- Total page count including front and back matter, and it must be a multiple of the signature. Not "about 200".
- Reading direction
- Right to left, which means the binding is on the right and the cover wrap is mirrored. A printer who is told this after the cover is built will build it again and invoice for it.
- Paper and caliper
- The caliper is what the spine width is computed from. Asking for "nice paper" gets a spine that is wrong by two millimetres and a cover that does not line up.
- Bleed and gutter
- 3 mm bleed, and a gutter allowance that grows with extent — a 240-page perfect-bound book swallows more of the inside margin than a 160-page one.