This 'n' that

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Did more laying out of the large-print edition--11 chapters down, eight to go. It may actually come in a little shorter than I thought, which is good. (Although it does mean that maybe I could have done it with 23-point line spacing. Oh well--I'm not laying it all out again now!)

Also I fiddled with the front and back covers (I can't do the spine until I know the exact page length). Because the text takes up so much more room, the large-print edition is a bigger book (7" x 10" instead of 5.25" x 8"), but apparently the proportions are close enough that I could just expand the cover art without making it look all distorted and weird. Whew!

Good!

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I wanted to see what I would need to do to get Trang below 400 pages (which is when you can start shrinking the side margins even more aggressively), and just by fooling with the margins of a draft I got it down from 550 pages to 360 pages--without having to shrink the type! So that's promising!

I had some real-life crap to do today, so I just worked more on the large-print layout. I really need to get cracking on Trust, the next book, in no small part because I keep telling people it will be coming out soon! I always procrastinate some before starting the next writing/editing round, so I kind of feel like this whole large-print layout thing is merely a very cunning delaying tactic on my part. But it is nice to have something you can do on days when you don't have a lot of time and are a little short on sleep.

Why do I talk myself into these things?

in

Wasn't I just very happy to be DONE laying Trang out? At least a large-print edition goes a lot faster--since it's not justified on both sides, you don't have to worry about loose lines, tight lines, or bad breaks. You can also bring down a line just by hitting the return button, since there's no difference between a paragraph break and a line break when the right side of the text column isn't justified.

Still, the double-spacing between paragraphs can actually make it really hard to get the bottom lines of the page to line up (and it can screw up the top lines as well, which isn't really something you have to worry about with a standard layout).

Nonetheless, I'm happy that this looks like it will work. The only thing I'm having to fudge is the amount of space between the lines of text. Per the APH, it's suppose to be 1.25 times the size of the text, so if you use 18-point text, there should be 22.5 points of space between lines. But Word won't support fractional points. If I make it 23 points, then the book gets almost too long for CreateSpace to print it--and judging from my experience with the first layout, once I finish lining up the text boxes, it will definitely be too long. If I make it 22 points, I have some breathing room. So I'm making it 22 points and hoping that that missing 0.5 points doesn't make the text illegible for anyone (I'm optimistic about that, because it looks like the APH standards are the most stringent). I should be able to price the book at around $20.

Hmmm....

in

I was thinking that, because I'm planning to shrink down the type font of Trang, that maybe I could repurpose the old layout as a large-print edition. But then I read the American Printing House for the Blind's large-print recommendations--wow. Eighteen-point type and 1.25 spacing between lines? That's BIG. On the other hand, they don't want the text to be justified on the right, which would make it really easy to lay out--I could just fiddle with the Kindle edition, because that already has extra spaces between paragraphs. At this point, it would cost me next to nothing to do, and I'm generally a big fan of accessibility. It would cost more for the reader because it would be really long, but if I don't make it available via Expanded Distribution, I could probably keep the price down to a reasonable level.

I think I just talked myself into doing it!

OK!

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Trang is ready! I ordered my copy--they've sensibly set it up so that you have to buy a copy and approve it before they will distribute it. There were a variety of shipping options, and I chose the slowest not simply because it's cheaper but because I want to take a break from it and read it with fresh eyes. It should arrive in the middle of February, and then barring catastrophe, it will be available for purchase!

Layouts and distribution

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About the next layout--I think I could cut even more by taking the text down a point in size. I don't want to get too aggressive about that, because obviously teeny text is hard to read, but I do think the print is pretty big right now. There's a weird multiplier effect because the shorter the book is, the smaller you can make the side margins (the binding will swallow up words in a thicker book), which of course makes the book smaller still.

The publishing-on-demand service I use is called CreateSpace and is owned by Amazon.com. They basically offer three distribution channels: The CreateSpace store (ever heard of that?), Amazon.com (now, that you've heard of), and something called Expanded Distribution (libraries and independent bookstores).

The weird thing is, you have to set a single list price (i.e. the price a reader will pay), but the amount you make depends on the distribution channel. For example, you could set a price of $20 for your 550-page book, and you would make $3.50 on every copy sold through the CreateSpace store (ooh! more than 15%) and lose 50 cents on every copy sold through Amazon.com (oops). Not that they'll let you sell your books at a loss, of course, but even if you were dim enough to do this, you'd probably go under posthaste because many more people buy through Amazon.com than the CreateSpace store.

The most expensive option for the author is Expanded Distribution. In order to use Expanded Distribution at all, you have to pony up $40, which also makes the book cheaper for the author, regardless of distribution channel. So unless CreateSpace makes a perfectly ghastly product, I'll pony up right away, which will bring the cost down, but not enough for me to use Expanded Distribution. Then I'll lay it out again (notice that I'm not making weeping noises--I have been shamed by Jeremy Robinson's example), put it on Expanded Distribution, and if I do a really good job, maybe drop the price by a buck or two for everyone!

(In defense of my crying and moaning about layout: I have to say that it (like all visual arts) is not something that comes naturally to me. I think I've made a decent-looking layout, but I feel like I have no instinctual understanding of how moving X will affect Y and Z--I just have to do it, see what happens, go back and fix what that screwed up, etc. You know how a really good hairdresser can just cut wet hair so that it looks great dry, even though wet hair is longer and a different texture than dry hair? I really, really lack that gift.)

Whew!

in

OK, I checked over the layout, and I uploaded both the interior and the cover to the publish-on-demand publisher! They'll need 48 hours to make sure I didn't just upload someone else's book, and then presumably it will be available for me to order. I'll buy a copy, read it over, and if it looks OK, I will make it available for sale!

Of course, "looking OK" at this point means basically "no chapters are missing." I just noticed two things that aren't exactly errors, but could have been expressed more elegantly...and I'm saving them for the next layout. Joel Derfner has a very funny take on the compulsion of writers to always improve their work, and how that runs headlong into the realities of production schedules, deadlines, costs, etc.,--which is probably a good thing, if you think about it. I have basically never read anything of mine that I didn't desperately want to take a red pencil to, until (and this happens, it's an interesting process) enough time has passed that I don't really think of the piece of writing as mine anymore, it's just kind of there. At that point, I usually really enjoy it and wonder what I was in such a lather about before. I suppose in a perfect world you'd always be that way about your writing--an impartial judge who simply looks upon it as text.

And someone who I don't know very well said some very nice things about Trang to me today, so yay! It's a good day!

Back in the saddle

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I was able to get back to work on the Trang layout today. I've been poking along at a rate of about three chapters a day, but today I managed to get five done (mainly by having fewer interruptions). That means 11 of 19 chapters are down, which gives me hope that this will be ready to be uploaded by the end of the weekend, despite some other busyness scheduled for later this week.

I spent the last two days at jury duty, which is a totally pointless activity if you have ever done any writing on law-enforcement issues, because they will never, ever seat you. I used the time to read about half of Publish This Book! which is a memoir about a guy trying to get that very book published. If you think that is incredibly clever, the author will heartily agree with you; if you think that sounds pretty weak, the author will pretend to agree with you as a means of deflecting criticism. Let's just say that I'm putting it aside for a while to read some sci-fi that I might include on my Listmania! list. (Really, honestly, and for true, if you are 24 years old, you have no business writing a memoir. It's not that you aren't a good writer--you can write about your childhood in quite an affecting manner--it's because you don't really have a strong sense of identity yet, and everything about your current life comes across as "LOVE ME! I'M COOL!")

A much stronger book in the PUBLISHING--AGGGHH!! genre (which, if current trends continue, may soon be the only genre produced by large, commercial houses) is the novel How I Became a Famous Novelist. It is genuinely hysterical. If looking for a publisher is driving you crazy or bumming you out, and you need to figure out a way to laugh at your situation, that's a good one to read.

I'm going to cry now

in

Real life is beginning to rear its ugly head, but today I figured I could finalize the layout of a chapter quick before I went to bed. So, I noodled around with everything to make sure all the bottoms of the page spreads were even, and then I went to combine it with the earlier chapters.

And that's when I realized that I gained a page earlier, and didn't repaginate all the chapters. So everything's lined up with the text on the other side of the page, instead of across the spread.

Ai-yi-yi. It's not only that I have to do the pages again, but I have to undo everything I did. I'm repaginating now.

On a lighter note

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This article pointed out that you can use the Listmania! feature on Amazon to let readers know what other books your book is like. So I made this list.

And clearly, given the kind of book it is, Trang needs wacky people and aliens on the cover. Sigh. This is where my lack of artistic ability and the limits of POD publishing really chafe me. It needs to be a fat little paperback with wacky cover art! Oh well.

Oh, and I figured out how to determine if "invisible" text will remain invisible: I have put little white bullets in a place where they will look purposeful and decorative if they do in fact print. Since I'm going to have to (sob) lay the book out again anyway, and the invisible text does look a tiny bit better, I think it's worth it to see if it works.

This is depressing on many levels

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The Writer Beware page on print-on-demand publishing links to here to a woman's account of trying--and failing--to use POD publishing "to achieve my true goals: getting an agent and getting a real publisher."

It's depressing, yet I suppose instructive, on multiple levels. For starters, it might as well be titled "Ingram Distribution Brutally Crushes Life Out of Promising New Writer." If you're wondering how committed the publishing industry is to fostering the world of letters, well, there's your answer for you. (The instructive bit is, yes, pay attention to distribution.)

The most minor depressing bit is that she thinks shiny paper is high-class. Oh, honey, no.

But the larger picture, which is also depressing, is that she's not understanding what she's doing wrong from a commercial point of view: It's not engaging in POD publishing; it's writing nonfiction books about folklore in the first place. There's often this belief that small presses and academic presses are kind of like farm teams, and that large commercial houses are the major leagues--you start out on the farm team, and then you work your way up. That's not true. Some (actually, most) books simply don't have enough commercial potential to be of interest to a big house--and again, it's mostly about genre, not the quality of the work. If her werewolf book, which sold 1,000 copies, had been picked up by a small or academic press and rescued from Ingram's dedicated efforts to KILL ALL POD BOOKS, it might have sold 5,000 copies, or even 10,000 copies. And she still in all likelihood wouldn't have an agent or a contract with a major publishing house.

If your goal, really and truly, is to break into commercial publishing, you have to write commercial books. Romance. Cookbooks. Mystery thrillers that slavishly copy Dan Brown. Please, I know more freaking romance writers--and many of them have comically little interest in the genre, it's just the easy way to get published. Being POD is irrelevant--one of the big self-publishing success stories is What Color Is Your Parachute? but the important thing to remember about that book is not that it was self-published but that it's a career guide, which is a very, very commercial kind of book. If, like me, you're just not willing to do that--your passion is folklore, or poetry, or cheesy sci-fi novels with a wimpy hero, lots of cussing, building action, and opportunistic homosexuality--then you need to acknowledge that about yourself and stop trying to figure out what you're doing "wrong."

But you can blame Ingram some. Seriously. What assholes.

ETA: I finally got over my depression enough to read the link to Jeremy Robinson's story, which was far less of a bummer. Robinson did eventually get an agent and a traditional publisher, but at the time of the interview, he had only the agent. It's interesting because Robinson's expectations are just so much more realistic (he's got a lot more experience in the industry). Unlike Jamie Hall, he fundamentally understands that his book is a tough sell: He's not expecting to hit the 10K mark in sales, he's shocked that it has sold as well as it has, and even with an agent, he's not taking it for granted that he'll find a U.S. publisher. I think that if his book had sold only 1,000 copies, he wouldn't be pulling it off the market entirely (because THAT will help sales) and deciding that it's all POD publishing's fault.

He's also a lot less whiny about doing layouts than I am.

You just gotta use what you have

in

So, I'm trying to finalize the layout here, and I've run into an interesting little dilemma. I'm using Word and Acrobat, but I don't have a proper page-layout program (Quark XPress, which is what we used to work with at my first publishing job, is $800--yoikes), and at this point I'm running into the limitations of the software I do have.

The main issue is that you can't just force a line of text onto the next page in Word. This was a feature of Quark I am missing right now--with that software, you can just say, "Go down, line!" and the line will dutifully move down. With Word, you can put in a text break, or you can put in a paragraph break, but line breaks are more elusive.

So my first thought was, I'll add in a bunch of nonsense text, and then I'll make it white. Voila! The nonsense text is invisible against the white background of Word and Acrobat, and the line is where I want it.

But then those dim memories of people in the art department weeping and wailing started to come back to me. See, the issue is, something can be invisible when you print it out, but NOT be invisible when the printer prints it out. Our managing editor doled out any number of savage beatings because "invisible" text was read by the printer's software, duly transformed into black text, and printed!

We segue to a quick publishing joke:
Q. How many managing editors does it take to change a light bulb?
A. You were supposed to have that light bulb changed last week!

Segue over! So, obviously, I was hoping for an alternative. I think I've hit on one--I am putting in a paragraph break, and then kerning out the last line before the break so that it spreads all the way across the page. It's not perfect--the line is a fragment of a letter too short--but I think it's close enough that if you're not looking for it, you won't notice it.

I mean, I guess I could risk an "invisible" text fiasco--I plan to see a copy of the finished book before I make it generally available in any case. But I think this fix is good enough, and it doesn't bring back memories of whips cracking and designers cowering in terror in a corner.

(OK, fine--the managing editor did not actually beat people. In boring reality, I liked her and had a tremendous amount of respect for her. But she was pretty tough.)

Oh, and if you're wondering why I'm pushing all these lines of text to the next page, take a book off the shelf and open it. Assuming there's no weird art and you're not at the end of a chapter, the blocks of text on the facing pages should both be the same length. If not, that managing editor has a weak arm!

Hmmm

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You know, the problem with me is that I am inquisitive. That served me well when I was a reporter, but it means that there are times when I don't leave well enough alone.

In other words, I've been doing some research into shrinking the margins of Trang. It turns out that if I did that, it would knock about 100 pages off the length of the book. That might be a good idea from a marketing perspective--if I'm on the fence about a book, I'm more likely to pick it up if it's shorter, because then if it's crap, it at least won't take that long to read. It would also bring down the cost of the book so that I could distribute it through some of the more-expensive channels (like making it available to libraries) without having to price it above $16.

So--argh. I really don't want to lay it out again right now, but I think the logic here is overwhelming. I'll put it up for $16, wait a little bit, and then (whimper) lay it out again and make it available through all the distribution channels.

A good rule for writers

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I'm just about done inputting the layout corrections. But you know that continuity error I thought I found yesterday? Well, it wasn't--I was just confused about how a piece of technology was supposed to work.

A really good rule of thumb to follow as a writer is, If you're feeling a certain way, then your reader is feeling A CERTAIN WAY. So, for example, if you're feeling bored writing about something, then for God's sake, stop and rethink, because your reader is going to die of ennui if they are forced to read another word. And if you're confused about a technology that you invented...well, really, why do you want to put your reader through so much pain?

So I don't look at the above situation and say, Silly me! If only I had read more carefully, I would have realized that this is how the technology works! Instead, I go on in there and add another sentence or two to make clear that, yes, this is how the technology works, don't be surprised when it works this way ten pages later.

It's probably an irrational belief I have, but I do think on a certain level that we all kind of know everything. At least whenever I write or edit, if something nags at me--however vaguely or subtly--and I ignore it, invariably someone else will point that exact thing out as a problem. So I've learned to really tune into that--those are problems to be solved, not the vapors to be ignored.

Getting toward the end here

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I proofed and inputted changes to five more chapters, and then proofed the rest of the layout. I'll input tomorrow--inputting changes is really tedious. Still, I can see that I got more adept at layout as the book went along, because there are far fewer art issues in the later chapters than in the earlier ones (and I don't think that's just fatigue speaking).

But I did find a continuity error in the last chapter! Oopsie! Well, that will be corrected soon enough. It is, however, an argument in favor of not putting up the e-books until after I finish laying out the print-on-demand version--you do just reach a point where you're so familiar with the material that you glide right over mistakes, but after it's laid out I think it looks different enough that it give you fresh eyes.

Of course, it's never going to be perfect. At my first job in publishing, manuscripts were proofread three times after editing, with a grand total of four people involved in each proofing. Then the layouts were proofread twice, and then after the book went to the printer, we got another set of proofs from them, which were read over. And there were STILL errors in the finished books!

Paper: Not free

in

I proofed five chapters of layout today, and then I just hit the wall--I've been pushing pretty hard lately, I guess. You kind of have to be a wimp about proofreading, because if you get tired of it you either don't notice errors, or you notice them but don't feel like doing anything about it. Both are very bad. In general, I'm not finding big errors in the text, just things like "lead" for "led," and some of the art problems I'm finding just aren't fixable, or the fixes look worse than the problem. That's actually good--that means I managed to fix most of the easy stuff in the first go-round. I'm going to save up all the text fixes and replace the e-book texts and jacket art all in one fell swoop, and then I am putting Trang behind me!

It's a long book! It's 550 pages all laid out. When I saw that, I realized that I could shrink the margins, but then I'd have to lay the whole thing out again, and if I have to do that, I'm going to shoot myself. So, it's just something for me to remember for the next book--go with the 3/4-inch margins, not the 1-inchers. It's going to be a 8 x 5 1/4-inch paperback, which means it's a trade paperback. Amazon's print-on-demand service doesn't let you make dinky pocket paperbacks, which I think is kind of a pity because that's really what I associate with sci-fi--fat little books you can cram into your jacket pocket. Trade paperbacks are more for Serious Literature--Viking Press titles in somber eggplant or olive hues, that kind of thing.

Knowing how long the book is brought me to the exciting quandary of pricing. Expensive paperback annoy me, even though that's pretty much the norm nowadays with trade paperbacks. But it turns out that my notion the book would retail for $12 is way off, so I pulled that estimate off my Web page. The way they set things up, you have to make it fairly expensive unless you want to actually lose money on each book. There's no $2 royalty on a $3 e-book; if I wanted to get a $2 royalty on a physical book selling on Amazon, I'd have to price it between $24 and $25! I think that's ridiculous, really--I'd be embarrassed to ask my friends to pay that much. There's a service you can sign up for that costs $40 but brings down the price of the book considerably, and I think I'm going to do it (even though it is kind of annoying to pay extra) just so the book isn't prohibitively costly.