Finishing Touches

Holy cow. I don’t think I’ve worked so much on Ampliterra since the Kickstarter. At that point, lots of the to-dos were for our artists, art director, layout artist. Now that we’re getting so close to being done, it’s coming back to me to finish everything up! Let me tell you a bit about what we’ve been working on these past two weeks.

Additional Content

In my last blog post, I talked a bit about how we’d be adding additional content to make the text fit more evenly on each layout. It took about a week to work through everything, but I’m thrilled with the result. Not only does it help the text look better on the page, but we ended up adding a lot more high-quality content in places where it made a lot of sense. Just by the virtue of our layout style, the spreads that needed the most additional text were generally characters that we had illustrated. What better place to add content than on the characters we already wanted to highlight? 

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s the draft layout spread for Hafifah Ahsan as of mid-July. You can see that there’s a block of white space between her biography and her quest threads. 

July 2023 Rough Layout Draft. Illus Franzilla, Layout Julie-Anne Muñoz

The white space wasn’t too egregious, but here’s the more up-to-date version.

August 2023 Near-Final Layout Draft. Illus Franzilla, Layout Julie-Anne Muñoz

Having the opportunity to fill some space makes it look neater and lets us add a little more flavor to this world. I’m really happy with the result.

Final Readthroughs

I feel like I’ve heard that old saying about how an author can always find a typo on the first page of their book a million times. I’m sure we won’t be immune to the occasional missing comma, but we want to make sure that Ampliterra is as error-free as possible. To that end, Caleigh, one of our amazing editors on the project, is doing a final readthrough now. 

Indexing

Since there’s just so much content in this book, I’ve really wanted to include an index to make the whole thing more navigable. To get to the point where I was able to do this, all of the content had to be in place in the book. Now that it is, I’m digging into that process. It’s a bit tedious, but should only take a few hours, and I can’t wait to see the whole thing in the back of the book. 

Printing

This last piece is probably what I’m most excited about. We’ve been looking at printers to do a limited-edition first run of Ampliterra! I don’t have too much to share here yet as we’re finalizing things, but we’ve been thinking about how to make this print run a little extra special. 

Well, folks, that’s all for now! I’ve got to get back to indexing. Normally, our next blog post would go up on September 8th, but I’ll be out of town, so keep an eye out for the next one on September 15th!

Until next time,

Austin