Latest Project: The BLT Hypothesis

Our latest project involves a couple of books for the Summit Academy Institute Press. The primary effort involved The BLT Hypothesis, which I think will be a groundbreaking work in the understanding of disabilities like ADHD, Asperger's and related conditions. The authors are some of the country's most knowledgeable experts in educating children with these conditions, and operate the largest group of non-profit schools in the country that are specifically designed for them.

Nina Messina did a very nice job on this cover, and the authors also had some help on the editing from Ruth Dean and Melissa Thomson at The Writing Toolbox. We set up the interior page layout and pagination on this one; Word was used and converted to PDF, which would not be my choice, but time was a big factor and in the end it all turned out fine. I am hoping the Institute can secure distribution through a group like the Autism-Asperger Publishing Company.

Normally I would convert all of this text into separate chapters using Quark, but since Word was used we just flowed the primary book block (front matter was handled separately) as one file. This was rather tricky - especially in the latter stages when Dr. Kaplar was building the index. I also would have liked the illustrations to have been handled differently, and this is a lesson to heed: always have your artist work with the publisher before illustrations are produced. The style was fine, it's just that in this case, the images were not drawn individually on separate pages, and they were really too small--so even when scanned at 300dpi, the results were barely acceptable. We are already talking about a second edition of this book, with better illustrations and a foreward by a nationally-recognized expeert who has read and commented on the book. That should come later in the year.