590 pages · 170,000 words · 6×9 paperback · Interior: 4 weeks / ~160 hours · Cover: 6 hours · Print-on-demand
The manuscript arrived as 700+ pages of 8.5×11 Word documents with no typographic distinctions — narrative prose, court transcripts, interviews, newspaper articles, photographs, literary epigraphs, and chapter subheads all treated identically. Each required its own typographic treatment. Sorting that out before a single page could be set was itself a substantial part of the project.
The cover art was not the same aspect ratio as the required cover dimensions. Stretching or cropping were not options — stretching distorts, cropping loses content. The solution was to extend the painting, creating new material along the edges that matched the original seamlessly, approved by both author and artist.