Those three little words may seem like nonsensical Latin (or at least chunks of Latin), but they have special meaning to the publishing world. They are the start of a project, filler text used to approximate the real thing, until the real thing can be placed. I recently flowed the famed lorem ipsum sequence onto a page—the first page of the new fly-fishing book series on which my father and I are collaborating (if you’re just joining us, see this post).

I needed to do a page and font test to see if we both liked the direction we had in mind for the series. Font set-up looks pretty solid, and we’re getting something on the order of 500-ish words per page (with no illustrations or other interruptions). There will undoubtedly be some tweaking, but I was pleased to see a clean page sitting there in InDesign, ready for use.

We have messed around with a few different paper sizes, but may run with a 6.5″ wide by 10.5″ tall format (approx. 16.5cm x 27cm). It’s a bit different than say, 6 x 9, and it provides enough extra space to keep the page counts reasonable with 30,000 to 50,000 words.

As an aside, we’ve gotten a few e-mails asking us who will be publishing the series (it could be 20 books, we’ll see). The answer is simple (if expensive): we will. Advances in press technology, as well as the spread of full-service printing/binding/warehousing/order processing/shipping companies, will allow us to publish ourselves without the headaches of the past. We are excited by all of it, and hope that lovers of fly-fishing books will be excited too!

As always, we’ll keep our respective blogs updated as the project moves ahead (and thanks to those who have already sent comments or e-mails of support, GB and I truly appreciate it).