The Chapbook: Cover and Publishing.

Cover

First, the cover needed to be made and so I went Canva.com as advised by my teacher and worked on the cover art. I also downloaded the base image from unsplash as it was copyright free and meshed with the themes of the stories.

For the font, each line has different one, I saw it was not only norm for books of this genre style to have it but also it emphasizes the importance of each line, the first shows that I wrote this book as by hand or in this case, by the heart (emotions) as the font is more relaxed and looks similar to hand writing. The second line, is in a formal font to showcase the history behind the words Chapbook as previously mentioned, it was a 17-18th centaury trend.  The third line, again is in formal handwritten font to connect with both of the elements, the theme of emotions and friendship and the formality of time. It also acts as the first hint to the themes of the story as with age, people grow but ultimately still retain a sense of youth in them.

The title of the book, "The Chapbook: A Story of Two Chaps", is a play on words that immediately should grab the reader's attention. "Chap" is a slang term for a man or a friend, which ties in perfectly with the central theme of the book: the enduring friendship between Calum and Max. The word "chapbook" is also a nod to the format of the book, as previously talked about.

The is meant to serve as the visual representation of the book's central theme. The two silhouetted men staring at the sunset on a beach perfectly captures the idea of friendship and connection. The two men in the image can be seen as a representation of Calum and Max, who have been through thick and thin together (The dark colors)  although the use of silhouettes also adds a layer of mystery and intrigue, while also allowing readers to imagine themselves in the place of the two men.

The inclusion of the two glitchy children, (which is a modified sticker provided by Canva) playing in the darkness underneath the silhouettes is my way to tie in the theme of youth and the passage of time. It suggests that while Calum and Max may have grown up and moved on with their lives, their memories and experiences as children still play a role in their friendship. The glitchy effect also adds a sense of nostalgia to the cover design as it should remind the reader of old tv or video games.

The end result came out like this:

Publishing

After making the cover and the content, it was time to compile the book. For the compilation I used draft2digital.com to put together my work. The service is a free E-book publishing website, along with multi online book store release. Unfortunately for this project, publishing on bookstores fell out of the project's scope so I used to just compile together the Ebook.

After inputting a short description, tittle and about me, I went forward. D2D allows me to select what I want and don't want in the book and auto formats and highlights the chapters. For this time I only chose, tittle, copyright page( protected by D2D), index and finally an about me page.

Then I had the choice in stylizing and downloading my book from here. After choosing the appropriate book style and design, I downloaded the compiled PDF.

(this is how it came out)

After the EBook was made, it was time to publish it online on my website. I created a new gallery page and put my PDF on Simplybooklet for easy viewing ( I knew about this service and talked about in my last term) and with that my project was finally over.

The project is now over and in the next post I'll be talking about my thoughts in another post.