These past couple of weeks we broke up the monotony of combing through the Internet looking for author affiliations because, while those are extremely useful, I don’t want my team to be stuck at their computers for endless hours. “Useful” doesn’t translate to “fun and exciting,” and we’re all still too young in our careers as publishers to become bored. So we sidelined the author research for a bit to focus on constructing small bios that will be inserted at the beginning or end of each author’s selection. These bios will give a short synopsis of the author’s life and what they are currently working on.
We also started to look into building the cover design brief that will go out next term. Looking at covers for hours on end is one of the best assignments that I ever gave myself, and hopefully my team agreed with me. We discussed which covers in the genre and surrounding genres that we liked and would like to see replicated for our title. (Hint: look for a more modern aesthetic than anything you’ve seen from CALYX before. It’s going to look amazing, and I can’t wait to see the final design!) Considering the notoriety of some of the featured authors, one of the challenges will be to creatively fit their names onto the cover with the title, CALYX logo, and editor’s name.