Icing on the Cake: Covers, Embossings, and Stamps

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The ingredients in creating a physical book are many, and we want your end product—your book—to be tasteful. Let us compare your book to a cake. A paperback book might be a cupcake, easy to carry around, convenient. Not known for longevity, a softcover/paperback is economical and perhaps even marketable. On the other hand, a hardcover book would be a birthday cake—a special, distinctive, custom-made affair. For book binding elements, there are headbands, endsheets, round- or square-back spines, and marker ribbons of satin or polyester to consider. Hardcover materials can be derived from leather, cloth, or composite paper.

Close-up of embossings: Crosshatch, Morocco, Staghorn

Our cover materials vary as much as the genres of the books themselves. Product names of cover materials range from alluring to downright odd:

Rainbow
Silktouch
Haalflinen
Brillianta
Matador
Prestige
Arizona
Kivar
Skivertex

Close-up of an embossed “rosebud” endsheet from Unredeemable Time

Unredeemable Time by Virginia C. Wood, clockwise from left: endsheets, interior page, and cover stamp

And if the cover material is the icing on the cake, the embossing would be the icing on the icing.  By embossing I don’t mean the lettering (the book title, stamped in gold or silver foil, for example). I mean the texture embossed into the cover material itself. Endsheets can also be embossed.

A subtle, classy touch for the discerning eye, embossings come in all styles. The names do intrigue:

vicuana
moroccan
kidskin
firenze
vellum
staghorn
llama
ceylon
grand levant
spunglass

Cover stamps have already been discussed in an earlier post, but just remember (we learned the hard way) that if the cover material of your book is a darker color (burgundy, navy, forest green, dark brown), choose a light/bright foil, like silver or gold. If your book cover is a lighter shade, like gray, yellow, orange, or sky blue, choose a dark pigment foil stamp, like black, blue, or brown.

Whatever materials and colors you choose, we’ll be sure to cook you up a good book, even a cookbook. Delectable!

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Ali de Groot is director of publishing at Modern Memoirs.

Heartache and Healing Words: How Reading Taught Me to Grieve

Emma Solis with her grandfather Miguel Solis, 2008

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It’s Christmastime, and I am in third grade. From my point of view, approximately four feet off the ground, I can see something tucked inside the squat, brown cubby bearing my name in shaky cursive lettering. I reach into the cubby and pull out the mystery gift left behind for me. It’s a paperback book, thicker than any I’ve read before, and far more grown-up-looking, too, with its painterly cover art showing a delicate hand touching a heart. A sticky note in the corner states, “To Emma—From your Secret Santa.”

 I look up and then down the humming, fluorescent-lit hallway, lined with student artwork and classroom doors. Kids and grownups crisscross the tiles, oblivious to my wonder. I expect to see my Secret Santa somewhere—a figure standing still amongst the chaos, looking right at me with a knowing twinkle in their eyes. But no such person appears.

Even with the plain evidence of the sticky note, I remain skeptical that the present was meant for me. Maybe it was meant for another of the four Emmas in my class. Those other Emmas sit quietly in class and read during recess. I’m the Emma who annoys our teacher daily by repeating “SpongeBob” lines during lessons. I can’t imagine that anyone would really expect me to read this serious book entitled Searching for David’s Heart: A Christmas Story, written by Cherie Bennett.

My curiosity gets the best of me. I glance at the first few pages and discover that it’s a novel about a girl who goes looking for the recipient of her older brother’s heart after he dies young in a car accident. I read a few more pages. And more. My own heart starts to ache, but I keep reading. I devour the book. About ¾ of the way through, my eyes fill with tears.

A few months before I received this book, my grandpa Miguel Solis died suddenly in a car accident while on vacation in Colorado. I cried with my family when we found out. But after that initial shared eruption of feeling, I felt lost without a guide, illiterate in the language of my new emotions. Rather than working through my grief, it was much easier to return to my normal ways, hellbent on remaining the obnoxious, happy kid I was before my grandfather’s death. I kept goofing around with my friends and would reply, “Great!” with a quizzical look on my face when teachers asked how I was doing. I didn’t talk about my grandpa. I didn’t draw or write about my feelings around his death. I didn’t know how to.

Reading Searching for David’s Heart changes this—it changes me. I start to understand how someone might put big, heavy feelings into words. And those words on the page draw out the feelings I’ve kept so tightly wound up and tucked away. By the time I get to the last page, I’m aware of a shift in myself. I feel like a different person—a fuller person, and a reader. That experience puts me onto books for the rest of my life.

“words on the page draw out the feelings I’ve kept so tightly wound up and tucked away.”

Today, this transformative reading memory connects me to my grandpa, whom I never got to know very well before he died. My family keeps his memory alive by telling stories about him, in which I recognize aspects of myself, my dad, and my siblings. I see the ways that his life helped form mine. There’s comfort in this recognition, and amazement, too, at the effects a person can have on another, even indirectly.

When I reflect on these Christmastime events from my third-grade year now, the most absurd aspect to me is that I still don’t know for certain who my “Secret Santa” was. I have no idea who helped push me out of my comfort zone to confront my grief and become a more rounded, mature person, a person who loves reading and is aware of its incredible power. I don’t know if they remember giving it to me, or if they had a clue as to how significant a gift it would be.

Sharing books and stories is one of the greatest ways people can influence each other, perhaps especially in childhood. I hope those who read my story here will be inspired to recall books you read and to think about how they impacted you. Start here: What is a favorite book from your childhood? Who gave it to you, or how did you find it? How did it change you?

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Although it sadly seems that Searching for David’s Heart is now out of print, there are countless other books that have left an indelible mark on my heart. In order to share some such titles with friends of Modern Memoirs, I am working with my colleagues here to create lists of the books that have made the greatest impact on our lives. Our first such list is entitled “Model Memoirs: Favorites of the Modern Memoirs Staff.” You can buy any of the books listed there at our Bookshop.org affiliate link, and your purchases will support our business and independent bookstores nationwide.

Over time, we will continue creating lists of engaging books we love to help guide and inspire your reading and writing lives, and we would love to hear from you about how reading them changes you.

Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client D. Patrick Winburn

D. Patrick Winburn published his book entitled William Wenbourne: Puritan Ancestor of Wenbourne, Winborne and Winburn in America with Modern Memoirs in 2020. This family history took seven months from the day he contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep. We asked Winburn to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.

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1. Your book discusses the life of William Wenbourne (c. 1610–1687), who came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1635. He is said to be the ancestor of most Wenbournes (of various spellings) in America today. Can you define your precise relationship to William? How have you researched your genealogy to confirm your connection to him?

Patrick Winburn: William Wenbourne was my 9th great-grandfather. My father was always interested in Winburn genealogy and had spoken to several relatives throughout his lifetime. One, Uncle Alfred Winburn, had a family Bible that went back to the early 1800s. That was the basis for the research I began to conduct. Before computers, I researched through various public libraries to find anything I could. In the National Archives I was able to find a book with some very good information by one of my distant ancestors, Judge Benjamin Brodie Winborne, about the Winbornes who lived in North Carolina, mostly in the 1800s. As online research became more accessible, I was able to reconstruct the remainder of the ancestry line.

2. What challenges or obstacles did you encounter in your research for the book? How did you overcome them?

Patrick Winburn: The greatest challenge to overcome was the fact that many of the rural places my ancestors lived didn’t seem to conduct safe recordkeeping, so many of the records I sought were missing. However, once I was able to connect back to New England of the 1600s, I found that lots of information exists on all of my relatives since the Puritans were incredibly good recordkeepers.

3. You are a lawyer by profession. How has your training and experience in your career helped you explore your ancestry?

Patrick Winburn: I found my legal training to be very helpful since I am used to looking at official documents and deciphering death records, for example. Modern Memoirs even used a scan of The Exeter Combination of 1639 as the frontispiece for my book. My ancestor signed this document, which is similar to the earlier Mayflower Compact and other significant colonial documents that established local government in America, so this was a crucial piece to include. In another nice design touch, we then decided to use William Wenbourne’s signature as a custom foil stamp on the book’s cover. Today, I am considering an expanded edition of the book, so that I can include more such documents in a reprinted volume.

The Exeter Combination of 1639, which has been compared and is similar to the earlier Mayflower Compact and other significant colonial documents that established local government in America. William Wenbourne’s signature is in the lefthand column, second from the bottom.

4. How long did it take you to write this volume, and how did you approach the process of winnowing down your research to create a succinct volume?

Patrick Winburn: The research felt like it involved several lifetimes, but writing the book only took a few months. I wanted the book to be like a legal brief with citations to official records to make it clear for future generations that what they were reading is factually true and provable. These were the original American Winburns—hopefully the book will provide a good starting point for others to research their family lines dating back to the 17th century.

5. You dedicated your book to people “who carry on the good name of Winburn.” Why do you think it is important to write about family history?

Patrick Winburn: It is something that I have always been interested in and presume other family members are or will be at some point in their lives. I wanted to preserve, through documents, that connection to the past as a means of situating our particular family history within the broader narrative of American history. My family of Winburns started out in the early 1600s in New England, but the next generation and those afterwards were almost all from the South. The book explains how that regional shift happened and became the prelude for the rest of the family history.

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Seeking the True Story

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I’ve recently completed researching and writing a 460-page commissioned genealogy for a client. It was a massive undertaking, involving fascinating characters and contexts, and it’s almost hard to believe I finished it! The manuscript is now out of my hands and moving on to publication, but I haven’t quite let go of it in my mind. After devoting the bulk of my professional energies to this book for the past year, I find myself reflecting on the basic genealogy standards that allowed me to complete this big project and that will be essential to all future ones that come my way.

Genealogy Standards, published by the Board for Certification of Genealogists, was a central text assigned during my studies for a Certificate in Genealogical Research at Boston University. The first sentence in the first chapter reads:

“All genealogists strive to reconstruct family histories or achieve genealogical goals that reflect historical reality as closely as possible.”

It seems unnecessary to state. After consideration, however, this statement strikes me as the single most important guiding principle of genealogists’ work. After all, we seek to discover the truth, or “reality,” of an ancestor’s life and the context in which they lived. We may start with a family’s memories and traditional stories, but then we must find evidence to verify the facts that underlie them.

That’s why the second sentence in Genealogy Standards says:

“They [genealogists] meet this goal by applying the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) to measure the credibility of conclusions about ancestral identities, relationships, and life events.”

The board’s standard requires exhaustive research, source citations, analysis and correlation, resolution of conflicting evidence, and soundly written conclusions. The process involves a lot of hard work, but genealogists shoulder it because the last thing we want to do is perpetuate falsehoods.

This arduous pursuit is also incredibly interesting and rewarding. Many of you know exactly what I mean because the genealogy bug has bitten you, too. Perhaps no one describes the type of person who answers the call to research one’s ancestry better than Ethel W. Williams in her book Know Your Ancestors: A Guide to Genealogical Research. She acknowledges our “duty to search out and record the truth,” and then she lists common attributes of a genealogist:

“He [or she] becomes, first of all, a full-time detective, a thorough historian, an inveterate snoop, and at the same time, a confirmed diplomat, a keen observer, a hardened skeptic, and apt biographer, a qualified linguist, a part-time lawyer combined with quite a lot of district attorney, a studious sociologist, and above all, an accurate reporter.”

We draw on our skills to solve mysteries, place our family’s story in historical context, uncover secrets, find missing records, scrutinize sources and information, confirm or debunk mythologies, and communicate the results of our research clearly and factually.

When I focus on the last part of Williams’ description, “accurate reporter,” I think about my undergraduate years in journalism school, when I learned three truisms that serve me well as a professional genealogist today.

“Even bad notes are better than a good memory.”

First, “Journalists [genealogists] are not expected to know everything, they are expected to know where to find it.” To me, there are two parts to this maxim—locating information and organizing it. None of us goes into a research project as an expert on all of the challenges and questions it will pose—that’s why we must research. We hone our skills and broaden our knowledge with every person we meet on the family tree. But at the outset, a good genealogist formulates a solid research plan by framing precise research questions and hunting down sources to answer them. Then, as we gather information, we organize it for easy retrievability. Research plans and recordkeeping systems keep us working as efficiently as possible.

Second, “Even bad notes are better than a good memory.” How many times have you looked back over notes and seen something that you didn’t even remember writing—and thanked your lucky stars that you did? How many times have you kicked yourself for not listing who said something, where they said it, or when? How many times have you downloaded a record and then not recalled where you found it? A good genealogist keeps a written (or electronic) record of details like these because we cannot store all of them in our heads.

Third, and most important, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. Great stories are only stories until we verify them. Easy answers found on cemetery websites and online family trees need to be documented and confirmed before we accept them. A good genealogist is methodical, working from the known to the unknown and applying the Genealogical Proof Standard every step of the way.

In our quest for “reality” or the truth, the discovery of additional sources and the revision of interpretations may affect previous conclusions, but then we adjust. Bit by bit, research then gives way to evidence-based writing, and possibly, to the sharing of our knowledge with others on a website, in a presentation, or maybe even in a 460-page book. By keeping fundamental genealogical standards in mind, we know that we journey on solid ground toward such goals.

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Reflections from Modern Memoirs Client James A. Heffernan

James A. Heffernan is a repeat client of Modern Memoirs. His first book, entitled The Reality of Hunter-Gatherers, was published in 2016, and came out as an eBook in 2018. His most recent project, Many Worlds: A Collection of Poems, was published with Modern Memoirs in 2019 with eBook conversion, POD (print-on-demand) service, and global distribution through online retailers. This book took just two months from the day he first contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep. In honor of April as National Poetry Month, we asked Heffernan to reflect on the second book: what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his poetry with others.

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1. You studied physics and anthropology at the University of Utah, and your first book with Modern Memoirs was a narrative examination of state and class through the lens of hunter-gatherer societies. Many Worlds is a poetic philosophical exploration of such concepts as time, freedom, truth, and nature. How did you come to choose poetry as your means of expression for the second project?

James Heffernan: Well, I had never released a book of poems before then, and I had been writing poetry for years. It was simply a matter of finding my favorite pieces on the computer, taking a few weeks to edit, and then delivering the file to you guys. As you point out, the process was swift and painless. I worked primarily with Ali, and her help was professional, excellent, and indispensable. My first foray into poetry could not have been more positive.

2. Describe your writing process as a poet.

James Heffernan: I’m not sure how others do it, but this is how I do it. Typically, I start with a subject. I either think one up, or pick up some clue somewhere, or whatever—I get the idea for a subject. And then I decide upon a rhyme scheme, unless I intend to write a free-verse poem. And once these choices are made, I write the poem. Doing it in reverse order generally doesn’t work for me; I have to have a subject in mind at the outset.

3. Who is your intended reader of the poems? What feedback have you received?

James Heffernan: I’ve received all sorts of positive feedback over the years, and very little negative. I’m what you might call a peculiar person, so my poems often reflect this. They can be rather abstract or abstruse, but I would rather have people interpret the poems as they like and not put myself in the way of that by explaining too much. Therefore, they can sometimes be challenging. I will say that all of my poetry is G-rated, so just about anyone who wants to can approach it.

4. Why did you choose to self-publish instead of publishing your book commercially?

James Heffernan: Well, I’m reminded of the comment in Dr. Zhivago that writing poetry as a profession is like being a botanist as a profession. Some make it work, but it’s rather awkward. My poetry, as I have said, can be abstruse and challenging, and full of supernatural stuff, and whatnot. So I figured there was no point in trying to find a publisher looking to make some money. My books have done pretty well, so there are no regrets.

5. What was it about your first experience with Modern Memoirs that you chose to work with us again?

James Heffernan: The professionalism and competence. The product delivered is flawless. I could not have had a more effective and enjoyable experience than working with Ali and the entire team at Modern Memoirs. Y’all definitely know what you are doing, and I wish you continued success in the future!

Interested in reading more? You can purchase Many Worlds: A Collection Of Poems in the Modern Memoirs online shop, Memory Lane Books & Gifts.

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Titles Are Born

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Our clients, as authors, often come to us saying, “I’m not sure about my book title… what do you think of this title? Or that title?” Or “Can you help me with the title?”

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I could give many tips on how to come up with a title, but you could also look online and find all manner of helpful info.

“I believe titles don’t need to be forced; they are born.”

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What I really want to say here is that I believe titles don’t need to be forced; they are born. And like most babies, they will emerge at the time that is right for them, and you don’t always know when that’s going to be.

It is important to leave time and space to let the title come to you, and it will. 

You probably already know the obvious—a title should reflect the tone of the book (serious, poetic, whimsical, scientific, literary, etc.). Naturally titles are often derived from a theme or a scene in the book. If the title is more obscure or poetic, it’s good to add a subtitle that explains and clarifies the content. Some titles have more punch because they’re commercially published and must jump out at you. 

It’s OK to collaborate on choosing a title, but don’t start asking EVERYone for title suggestions or feedback on your title options. This opens a can of worms and causes confusion and delays. Sit with your own thoughts; go with your gut instinct; maybe even call the midwife, an editor. 

Then, once you’ve chosen it, “google” your title and check that it hasn’t been coined anywhere else (book, video, poem, song, etc.). 

If you’re selling the book, you might ask a commercial editor or publisher their opinions. If you’re not selling the book, I’d say just listen to your intuition.

Some of my favorite (commercial) titles simply say it as it is:

Accordion Crimes

A Grief Observed

Crime and Punishment

No One Can Pronounce My Name

Others are more mysterious:

Ballad of the Sad Café

To Kill a Mockingbird 

100 Years of Solitude

Last Night at the Lobster

Length? A longer title or subtitle might affect the front-cover design (fitting of the words), but that’s another topic. There are plenty of intriguing long titles:

 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again

And short ones:

Passing

Plainsong 

Snow Country

Beloved 

Hopscotch 

Some of my favorite Modern Memoirs (non-commercial) book titles: 

There’s a Book in Here Somewhere

I Dunno

A Narrative of Certain Events in the Life of Russell B. Newton, Jr. 

Don’t Believe a Word of It

I Said I’d Retire…

For my part, the title that was born to the tribute book I wrote for my late mother is Learning to Speak. How did it come to me? When I was almost done with the writing and happened to be on a 3-hour car trip, I said to myself,  “I need a title!” Drive, drive, drive. The title came to me as I crested the Bourne Bridge on Cape Cod, close to my arrival point. I said it out loud: “Learning to Speak.” For me, it came at the perfect time. Trust yourself. 

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