London Book Fair 2013- Reaction to Nikahrat

In April, I attended the London Book Fair hosted in Earls Court for three days.

My main purpose of this trip was to speak with publishers and book designing companies and showcase my personal work and portfolio. I had taken a couple of smaller, mini zines and some handmade plushies to show my skills in a different, quite interesting format.

I did manage to make a few copies of The Nikahrat. However, I encountered quite a few problems.

The first problem was paper choice. I wanted to go for a nice textured, slightly thicker paper to add to the handmade, folklore theme. This was fine, but I forgot to take into account the thickness of the entire book when it was finally put together. It made it very difficult to close which caused some problem.

The second problem was colour quality. I tried to make up a book using InDesign, but when I printed everything off, the colour were really dull and the orange and green hues could not be seen at all. I then had to revery to printing the spreads individually via Photoshop. This meant I could control the colour much better and not risk losing any brightness and effect.

This unfortunately lead to my biggest (and most costly) problem. Though Photoshop is excellent for printing colour, the page settings for alignment are very temperamental. I could not centre an image as, even though it would suggest the image would be "central", the printer default positioning meant it was off by 10mm. This then meant that when I flipped the paper over to print double sided, the pages were off-set by a total of 20mm. This looked very unprofessional indeed.

After much trouble and a lot of wasted paper, I managed to created smaller versions that I printed off my A4 inkjet printer. The small size was actually a nice quality  and it was nice to finally see the colour version in its intended form. There were still some issues with white offsets but most of it was rectified. Time constraints stopped me from making more.

-- HOW THE NIKAHRAT WAS WELCOMED AT LBF'13 --

• Story was original
• Characters were very imposing but relatable
• The amount of detail put into such small areas seemed to impress many
• My attention to symbolism was clever and very thought provoking
• The size of the book was rather "quaint", giving it the impression that it is a little lost secret

Overall, I was given much praise for my efforts, with a couple of publishing companies and independent booksellers exchanging contact information with me and requesting that I go back and inform them of the book's completion.