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MAKE A BOOK There used to be an unavoidable bottleneck in publishing: authors would have to send their manuscript to a publishing house and then wait months and sometimes years to hear whether it had been accepted for publication. If accepted, it would be handed to an editor and a book designer in whose hands it might become something very different than the author had hoped it to be. Mainstream publishing still works that way, but desktop computers have given us other options. This workshop will show you how you can design your own books using templates, print them inexpensively with a print-on-demand company, and sell them online through Amazon. Examples will include picture books and fiction and nonfiction titles.
- This handout accompanied a workshop given at the Goddard IMA fall residency 2011; hardly any of its material is original. I. Intro: book
45 trillion pages are printed annually around the world (2005). Books have been enormous for all of us but we mostly know very little about how they are made or how they get to us. We don't notice most of the detail of book-making skills. Learning about the making and selling of books opens a door into a venerable ancient world and a contemporary scrum. II. Existing models of publishing:
1. The old model - large publishing firms. They have a huge, hierarchical staff of management, general editors and line editors, designers, and marketers. Print runs are large. A large print run has been the most cost-effective way to print, but it needs a lot of up-front money. And then warehousing these large print runs is expensive too. So the large publishing firms need to recover large costs and tend to look for blockbusters that will sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Recently publishing houses have been bought and sold many times so that even the family houses that used to pride themselves on publishing quality will now often slip into bestseller mode. Andre Schiffrin 2000 The business of books: how international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read Verso Imprints: a large publishing firm may have a small internal subsidiary with its own design and editorial philosophy. These are called imprints, and they sometimes will specialize in for instance poetry. An example is Knopf, an imprint of Random House. It publishes for instance beautifully designed poetry books. 2. College presses. These publishing houses support the prestige of their colleges and are subsidized by them so they can afford to publish scholarly books that have limited appeal to the large public. MIT Press is an example. The University of California Press. And many others. 3. Small press publishing. Poetry and experimental prose are often published by independent presses run by small groups of dedicated people who believe in good writing. Small presses generally have a smallish print run but still use conventional distribution through bookstores as well as the internet. They are usually funded by grants and they pay both themselves and their authors poorly. A variant of the small press is the co-op press, in which members are required to contribute a certain number of hours of work. 4. Vanity press publishing. You'll often see ads saying "Publish your poetry!" If you contact these presses they will try to sell you a publishing package whereby you pay them thousands of dollars and they 'publish' - ie format and print - a given number of copies of your manuscript in book form. Anything printed by a vanity press will not be picked up by distributors and booksellers and is automatically sneered at by readers. 5. Print-on-demand self-publishing. Digital technologies have allowed a whole new model of printing. Given a digital file, POD houses can print any number of books, from one to thousands, almost instantly and at quite low cost. These technologies have made self-publishing popular. In self publishing authors are responsible for their own editing and designing. They pay for printing, but only for printing, and the cost per book, depending on size and format, can be as low as about $4 a book, higher for a hardback coffee table size. Their contracts with the POD house allow them to own their copyright and to print as few or many copies as they like, as often as they like. They are allowed to switch to another POD house or to a regular publisher whenever they like. Some POD houses also have offices in for instance Britain, and there can be contracts for printing in other countries too. The POD house itself usually will sell the books it prints through a website, for a percentage, if the author wants that. POD houses also can have various kinds of contracts with distribution houses that sell either to bookstores or online. When books are sold through these channels the distributors and sellers take a cut but authors still tend to get royalties higher than they'd get through a regular publisher. They can also sell their books themselves, and when they do, they get the whole price of the book minus printing and mailing costs. Some self-publishers have made buckets of money, usually with a how-to book. Some of the most successful titles at the moment are books on how to self-publish. Some POD houses will also act as a vanity press - ie they will do the editing and designing at quite a steep cost. III. Inventing an in-between publishing model 1. A virtual imprint model I've had student manuscripts I think are so good they should be published, and I've started to devise a publishing model that might be somewhere between POD self-publishing and small press publishing. I thought I could be general editor of a series of embodiment studies books published by what I call a virtual imprint. It would have a unified design and editorial philosophy, like a conventional imprint. It would not be - or look like - vanity publishing, because there would be a quality control process - an editor, or editors. The imprint style would be designed by me and my authors and then applied to all the books in the series, so individual books could have the benefit of imprint credibility. At the same time, for financial purposes, authors would be self-publishing. They would have individual contracts with a POD house, and would deal with all financial transactions themselves. They would make their own distribution and selling arrangements and receive their royalty checks directly. They could sell through Amazon, through their own websites, or maybe through a common imprint website. Legally, under this arrangement, it is they who must be named as publisher on the copyright page, so a book's copyright page would identify the publisher as "XY Author with Ant Bear Press." Under this model authors get higher royalties and retain all rights. They would end up with a finished book they could then take to a regular publisher if they wished. They would have learned more about printing and publishing than they would have in regular publishing. Another part of the model is that there should be an press cohort that congregates online for mutual support with editing, proofreading, and marketing. There could be members of the cohort who aren't publishing just now but who are interested in the model and/or have publishing/marketing experience. Members of the cohort could also review each other's work and/or find other reviewers. Unlike a publishing co-op, cohort participation would be voluntary. I want to acknowledge help from two former students who helped me develop this model, Jeanne Hewell Chambers, a seasoned publisher and publishing teacher who gave me a good resource list, and Becki Noblit Goodall, with whom I began to think about publishing embodiment studies books. I've also had help from Val Speidel, a high level book designer who learned to design books with Press Gang, a Vancouver women's press. 2. Ant Bear Press It has taken me years to get set up to put the virtual imprint model into practice: there has been a lot of up-front learning. For instance there has had to be a lot of research to figure out which POD house is best for my purposes - which offers the sizes and paper colors I would want, which has the best contract, which has best connections with Amazon, which offers the best royalty deal. As soon as one is involved in selling there also has to be research into business licenses and taxation law. Learning book design and especially type design is huge. There is a gorgeous book design software from Adobe, called InDesign, but it takes a while to learn and needs quite powerful recent hardware that has taken time and money to assemble. But Ant Bear Press does exist and has issued its first title. Here is the Amazon page for The agency of bliss. The design is by the author, who graduated here two semesters ago. Variations will be used for a series of Ant Bear books. Ant Bear's goals:
IV. How to do it yourselves 1. Financial overview of self-publishing
If you sign up for a package that includes editing and/or design help from the POD house, it will cost you upward of $1000 per book. If you do editing and design yourselves, costs in this model are minimal. They include: > An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number, a unique 13-digit number assigned to every book that identifies its binding, edition and publisher. Whoever has the contract with the printer has to own the ISBN, and you need it when you open your printing account. You will also need it if you want to sell your book online or in bookstores, place it with distributors and wholesalers, or put it in libraries. An ISBN is international though it is assigned locally. Audiobooks and e-books also need ISBNs. An ebook version of a printed book needs a separate ISBN. Each different format (eg paperback and hardcover, ebook, and different kinds of ebook) is assigned a separate ISBN. You can buy them online or on the phone. If you hope for more than one book get several at a time so they can have the same publisher number. One number is about $30, 10 for $275. 1-888-269-5372 or on the Bowkers website. > A bar code. A barcode is used by sellers to track inventory. You must have one if you are going to sell your book in any public venue including Amazon. It includes your ISBN and the book's price. Normally you must buy your bar code yourself and design it into the back of your book cover using Photoshop or something similar. They are about $10 and you can get them from Bowker's too. > Registering copyright: with the Copyright Office. $30. Optional. > A set-up fee. This is a one-time fee charged by the printer when you arrange to have a title printed. The fee could be $75-$150, but many times a POD house will waive the fee if you are ordering a certain number of copies. It may also waive the fee as a special promotion. > Proof copy. The printer will send you a first copy of your book to check for printing errors. If you approve it, they can go ahead. If not, you work with them to figure out what you or they were doing wrong, and you fix it. Lightning Source charges $30 for an overnight proof copy. If you have to go through more than one proof cycle, it will cost that much each time. > Per-copy print costs. These usually depend on three variables:
> Author copies - copies you want to give away or sell yourself - will always be this basic minimum cost, with sometimes a small discount for volume. > Listing costs. A POD house may charge a small yearly fee for listing your book in its distribution catalogue. All of these costs can be written off as business expenses in your taxes.
Royalties are the percentage of the selling price the author gets. Most profitable are direct orders - you sell your books yourself in person or through your own website. When you sell through any other venue, the seller will take a percentage, which varies. Bookstores are used to a 40% discount off the cover price. Libraries don't get this discount. Resources on self publishing Kavka and Heiser 1993 The successful self-publisher Holt 1985 How to publish, promote, and sell your own book Dan Poynter The self-publishing manual: how to write, print, and sell your book, 20th Edition Dan Poynter's site filled with information for starting your own publishing company Tom and Marilyn Ross Complete guide to self-publishing: everything you need to know to write, print, publish, and promote your wwn book More information from Tom and Marilyn Ross Peter I. Hupalo How to start and run a small book publishing company: a small business guide to self-publishing and independent publishing
2. Stages and skills a. Editing One of the advantages of mainstream publishing is that you get immaculate editing, fact-checking and proofreading services. In self-publishing or in my model of virtual imprint publishing it's important to find ways to accomplish these things equally well. Editing is first of all about making sure a book is readable: makes sense: has its parts in an order that people can follow. The most useful thing here is to enlist readers - readers like the audience you intend for your work - and ask them to tell you exactly where they got bored or got lost or disagreed. You then use that feedback to change whatever needs changing. Once a book's structure is in order, there needs to be fact-checking and line-editing. Fact-checking includes things like making sure references and quotations are accurate. Line-editing fixes fine points of grammar, spelling and sentence structure. For this stage you need a good style guide like The Chicago manual of style, and you need to run the manuscript past friends who are grammar geeks. It's easy to miss typos, so proofread at least 3 times very carefully. Ask others to proofread too. Preparing a manuscript for the design stage
b. Choosing a POD house - examples There are many POD houses, with all sorts of differences in the way they operate. They all have representation online. I am only going to talk about the two POD houses I've settled on so far. > Lightning Source for black and white text-based books Lighting Source website: Lightning Source does not baby its publishers. It expects press-ready files formatted exactly as instructed. It supplies templates to help with cover and text design decisions. It also has tutorials and file creation guides linked from its index pages. There's someone called Aaron Shepard who has written books about the process of working with Lightning Source and distributing with Amazon. Aaron Shepard Aiming at Amazon and POD for profit. > Blurb for colored picture books Blurb website: Blurb does high level color printing and is popular with photographers and artists. If you want colored text, Blurb is also the way to go. With Blurb you can print elegant coffee table books on good paper with a hard cover and well-printed paper jacket. These books are pricey per copy but work beautifully as professional portfolios of work. You can also print tiny playful books with soft covers - a very wide choice of sizes. Blurb does baby its publishers to a certain extent. It offers three levels of design help, from templates in which you basically just drag and drop, to templates you'd use with a high-level book design software like InDesign. It also offers free web seminars on aspects of book making. It has tutorials and a forum page. It will sell your book on its large website (for a cut), where it runs contests and other promotion schemes. Other companies: c. Designing Designing a book involves a lot of decisions, first about page size and then about cover art, layout and typefaces. It can be either very hard or quite simple. The simple way is to pick an example of a book whose design you like and just copy it as well as you can with the resources you have. It's also pleasurable to get into the ancient honorable art of book design with all its esoterica about type design and layout. For printing purposes you are constructing two files: a cover file and a bookblock file, the bookblock being the whole interior of the book. > Design examples: Poetry books: one that jumped at me in the bookstore so strongly that I paid money for it was Sharon Olds 2007 The unswept room published by Knopf, an imprint of Random House. I like the trim size, 5.875 x 8.375 (a bit wider than the usual paperback), the thick cream paper, book block layout with a lot of white space. The type design in Bell. The cover design is lovely altogether. Cover image of a 2nd century BCE mosaic. About 130 pages. Sells in the US for $16. Printed and bound in the US. Knopf can afford large press runs and so has options POD doesn't offer, though, for instance the pale metallic bronze on the cover. Picture books: Aperture Press designs beautiful photography books. One I like is called William Christenberry, published by Aperture in 2006 to accompany an exhibit of that photographer's work at the Smithsonian. The trim size is about 12.25 x 10.25, high quality smooth paper, about 200 pages, set with sans serif heads in black and red-brown, with text in a black serif font. Sells in the US for $50. > The cover file You would probably design your cover in Photoshop and then convert it to a PDF file to send to the printer. It is one spread with front, back and spine laid out continuously. The width of the spine depends on the number of pages and the thickness of your paper. Printers offer cover templates for their different sizes of book, and these templates will calculate spine width if you enter your page total. Your barcode gets designed into the back cover of the book. A colophon is a publisher's trademark, like the little penguin you see on the spine of Penguin books. The Knopf colophon is the borzoi image. Here is a cover I'm working on, and here is another version. Bleeds - when you are designing with photos meant to run right to the margin, as often happens with cover art, you have to design them to extend past the margin, to allow for tiny differences when pages are trimmed to size. > The bookblock file There are various kinds of layout software. I use InDesign. As with the cover file, the bookblock file will be converted to a PDF before you send it to the printer. Blurb has easy-to-use templates that let you drag and drop. Jargon:
Have a look at your favorite books to find examples of text design, which includes title design and copyright page design. E-books, kindle At this point I don't know very much about how to format e-books, but there is a lot on the web about it. DESIGN RESOURCES: > Books about layout:
> Books about type design:
This very useful book has page after page of paragraphs formatted in a range of typefaces (Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Century Expanded and Helvetica), each in a range of fonts - ie point sizes and bold or italic styles - and leadings - ie line spacings. Claudia Guerra used to work for Wiley Press and recommended their website for lists of all kinds of book design resources. d. Contracting Before you upload your files to the printer you'll need to sign a contract. This usually happens through their website. Various decisions are needed at this stage. Lightning Source has a title setup tutorial to help you through them. e. Pre-flighting and uploading This lovely term means checking your final PDF files to make sure they meet printer criteria and will print successfully. Pre-flighting is a term used in the printing industry to describe the process of confirming that the digital files required for the printing process are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and of the desired type. The term originates from the pre-flight checklists used by pilots. When you export files from your design software to the PDF format the printer asks for, the first thing to do is to check them in Acrobat Reader to make sure they look right. Blurb will run a further preflight check on your uploaded files for you but for Lightning Source you are solely responsible - they will print what you send even if there are mistakes. Most files can be uploaded to the printer online. Very large files, large picture books perhaps, can be sent as hard drives, CDs, DVDs. f. Printing and proofing The printer will run off and send a proof copy for you to check. When you have okayed the proof, you are ready to print as many copies as you like, whenever you like.g. Marketing decisions Amazon Websites Free business (for profit and not-for-profit) start-up advice and instruction from retired business men and women in some cities h. Promoting Send out review copies that you buy at cost. M. J. Rose How to Publish and Promote Online John Kremer 1001 Ways to Market Your Books Ant Bear promotion thoughts We could invent. Not 'sell' it, find a way to get it to whoever needs it without ever sounding commercial. Some way that's fun for us, not embarrassing.
Lewis Hyde The gift. Who is the book for?
Quotes on posters with a web address? Illustrations in limited print runs. Postcards with quotes? So they can tell their friends? I've seen someone promote a novel with a website book trailer. Ant Bear's publishing model is part of what will matter so maybe there should be a small paragraph in the copyright page? Gradually the whole series adding up to more than any individual work. Back cover blurb: What wd you want them to know about you and the book? What wd you want to tell them if they happened to be sitting next to you on a long flight and you talked? Just a conversation with someone you like. Someone smart and friendly who asks questions. What kind of backstory or context would naturally come up. We've got antbearpress.com. APPENDIX - DESIGN DECISIONS LIST I. The material book
II. The parts of a bookblock
III. Page layout:
IV. Styles:
V. Images VI. Cover:
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