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 NB: I've spoken to the mods about this thread—I'm including a single plug for the book here at the top, and I'm otherwise not linking to it. Movin' on: So, I self-published a book. Pitching wasn’t going awfully. I was at 31 rejections, but the number of heartening personalised rejections was going up, and I got a few full reads—it was agonising, but my queries were improving and I was making headway; I reckon I could’ve sold it in another year or so. 30 isn’t crazy: big authors were throwing out their debut rejection numbers on Twitter a few months ago, and 40–60 seemed like the average range. Then two problems happened: * WorldCon had announced it was coming to my hometown, and the clock ran out for selling and getting to print in time. I’ll be damned if I‘m gonna walk around at the Hugo Awards as “local guy whose short stories are moderately popular with a certain crowd”. No dammit, I’m going to be a novelist. * Gideon the Ninth came out, and had some similarities that worried me. Folks generally know how long a book takes to produce and there’s a grace period for not being a ripoff, but I couldn’t guarantee I was going to sell it in time. I was already thinking about it and had most of the stuff prepped, and Gideon sealed the deal. I was working in publishing at the time, as a publicist. I’ve also worked as a pro editor and typesetter. I had the skills and connections to make a pro-quality book happen, so I just … did. And I thought it would be a good idea to go through the process of doing that: what it takes to go from Google Doc to a print book in stores.  So here it is: a complete guide to getting a book made. PART 1.1: FILES (THE COVER) You’re going to need to get yourself a cover. This can happen before or after you’ve set up your actual book files, but I just find it better workflow to have them all sorted out first and ready to go. Readers absolutely judge a book by its cover. The standard book cover budget in the industry is around $10,000 USD. Rule of thumb: your cover should be 40–60% of your budget. I paid $1500 NZD for mine, but I saved a lot by getting an artist to paint the cover (the amazing Pepper Curry) then doing all the PS/lettering/layout myself, and was still the biggest expense by miles. You’ve got two options here: custom or premade. Premade covers are, well … premade, which means they’re significantly cheaper. Many folks go for this option, and—especially if you’re doing the whole 20to50k thinking cranking a book every 3 months—they’re a solid option. Lovely goon George Cotronis does very cheap covers, and has a great selection of premades on his site. Do not go to anybody whose portfolio includes Poser models. I know that sounds obvious, but I’d say a solid 50% of indie cover designers out there use Poser; the covers look like poo poo AND the artist is gonna be re-using the models in cover after cover.  Generally speaking, buying premade means you own the cover rights and the artist can’t sell to anybody else. That’s not universal, though, and it’s good practice to ask. Some artists (like George) will sell non-exclusive premades super cheap. If possible, get a high-quality .tiff with the layers intact. A note on regional covers: In getting cover feedback, I noticed a weird pattern, and I went digging. The people who hated this cover:  were overwhelmingly American, and they all had the same criticism: it doesn’t look like book covers look. Here in NZ? The cover has been super popular, and booksellers have been putting it face-out. Turns out “what a book cover looks like” is largely cultural. * Americans want absolute clarity re genre and content. Fantasy must have a man with a sword, Sci-fi must have a spaceship, Romance must have a sexy person or a couple holding hands. * The UK/Australia/NZ want something intriguing that makes them flip it over * The Germans are insane and that’s probably another 20k words that would leave me smelling faintly of lilacs. <3 you Germany, you absolute mad lads * Nowhere in the world does book covers that look like they belong to knockoff Russian animated movies but designers keep trying to sell them for some reason. Here are the US and UK covers of the same book:   The UK cover is a special edition, and it’s textured: the dots are raised bumps. The back has a similar pattern, and the blurb is on the inside fold. I couldn’t find the German cover but I assume it’s the sound of a one-string violin, slightly flat but perfectly imperfect, carried on the autumnal breeze while two lovers argue over a picnic table. Anyway: FORMAT Ideally, you’re working with your HQ .tiff in photoshop, that you’re planning to turn into a PDF. Size will depend on what you want. What counts as a NORMAL COVER SIZE actual varies based on region but if you’re using KDP, you’re locked into US sizes and 6x9 inches is the go-to. That means the canvas size is 18x9 inches + spine width. KDP is finnicky as gently caress with this: it throws a fit and refuses to process if you’re a fraction of an inch out. TONE Regardless of where you are, a book cover should communicate the tone of the book. I wrote beautiful goth trash about mushroom punks, so I wanted something moody and weird, but also something with flashes of colour: golds and greens, rebirth and sunlight. That works for some books; it does not work for others.  Ask yourself: does my self-help book about connecting with your inner child make me look like a serial killer? If you answered ‘yes’ then you may need to reconsider your cover’s tone. CHOOSING A TYPEFACE The typeface has a big job: to be basically a bunch of black sticks that clearly communicate the genre, content and themes of your book. The cover illustration has that same job, but people underestimate how much weight the title typeface pulls. I had a really difficult job: I’d written a sort of … speculative 1920s Singapore with highly advanced biotechnology, that was sorta-steampunk-but-not-really. I figured the illustration had the dark and biotech stuff covered, so my initial thought was Art Deco:   but it wasn’t quite clicking. Those typefaces would look ridiculous in an email but on a book cover they seemed weirdly neutral. I started shopping around for more Art Nouvea/Victorian fonts and eventually found The Crow, which is loving absurd and looks like it belongs on a goth teenager’s notebook and … it looked perfect on the cover.  I’m goth trash, sue me. People undershoot all the time, and it just looks wrong.  When picking a typeface, it’s hard to go too far but it’s really easy not to go far enough. This threshold will depend on your genre: SF/F gives you a lot more leeway to go over the top with it. Also, never use Chiller. It’s a loving epidemic and it has never once looked good. Oh no all those words and we’ve only talked about the front cover. Guess that leads us to: HITTING IT FROM THE BACK A good blurb isn’t the same as a synopsis: it’s much shorter (<200 words), and its job isn’t to explain the plot, it’s to communicate the vibe and create questions that the reader wants to answer. The first thing you’re gonna want is a pull quote: it’s an evocative line from (or about) the book, big text, highly visible. Is often at the top but doesn’t need to be: if it’s bigger, people will read it first anyway. Relatedly, you want to see a poorly-chosen typeface?  Oof. I didn’t go with that on the final cover (I ended up using Cambria: something more neutral for the back) but my initial pull quote was a bit too Nightmare Before Christmas. Combine with the word ‘kiss’ and a lot of people thought it was a romance novel. It’s curly and expressive and it was too much for the back cover. Anyway, my actual blurb:  Which was heavily based off the final version of the query letter I was shopping around. It includes: * What’s happening in the first chapter (the plague ship) * Main character * Main plot thrust * Main emotional thrust * Questions that reader will want to answer The first chapter thing is pretty common in query letters but I think it’s good practice for blurbs: let the reader jump straight in with minimal fuss. A lot of readers will drop after the first 5–10 pages, and giving them some context in that critical space is a good way to keep them more engaged. Get some quotes too. We’ll go into ARCs in a later post, but quotes are a great place to communicate elements you couldn’t get into the blurb. In this case: story actually kinda upbeat, story very gay.  They’re also a powerful social proof element—people are more likely to do something if they know other people are doing it too. The last thing you need is a barcode. If you’re using KDP then it’ll autogenerate one for you and you just need to leave a blank space. If you’re using a local printer, you’re gonna need to sort that out yourself. There are free barcode generators online, then just chuck it on with a photo editor. ANYTHING ELSE? If you’re sure you’re done, merge layers, export to PDF, pray to the gods that you’re not 0.02 of an inch out. Anyway: NEXT UP: 1.2: FILES (the internals) SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Nov 10, 2019 |
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Nov 10, 2019 07:42
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n8r posted:You have no typesetting for the print version of your book. IIRC you have to style it with HTML or it will show up as one blob of text.  It might be a couple of weeks away: I'm trying to handle the publicity rollout around Christmas while moving house and everything is just chaos. I've never styled a print book with HTML; an .epub file is basically a bunch of zipped XHTML files so that's similar to what you're talking about? I'm not sure how Amazon's default formatting handles books, though, and it might just be making an epub and tweaking it with bleeds and poo poo. quote:How did you handle story/content editing and copy editing, you mention $1500 for the cover, what'd you spend in editing? Editing BY FAR is our biggest expense. A friend then went and edited it for free and found about 50 typos so uh, don't edit it yourself. I don't care how good you are, you're too close to it. I learnt that the hard way. My ego is gonna get me killed one day. quote:Are any of you guys doing Ingramspark / Lightning Source? We've actually been printing books through KDP, then turning around and selling them to ingram and baker and taylor. Supposedly ingram can migrate KDP files over to their system automatically. If you think KDP is picky about files, lightning source seems absurd. quote:Not that it matters much, but I work for a very very small non fiction indy publisher. I have no idea how anyone makes money in this business. The only reason we are where we are is a very very long time in business and pure luck.
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Nov 14, 2019 08:20
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feedmyleg posted:I've found that ebook blurb formatting allows for carriage returns but paperback requires <br> between lines, despite being identical forms. loving hell. The Kindle and Print HTML was identical but print was broken; I spent like a week in October trying to fix it with various resubmissions etc and nothing worked. Christ, what an awful platform.
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Nov 15, 2019 23:10
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Yes, sorry! I moved houses and then suddenly Christmas is on me. Bad time to thread, but I'm finally putting together file preparation today. ETA tonight.
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Dec 8, 2019 01:54
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I'd like to apologise for the delay; Sebmojo got me drunk when I was meant to be writing. PART 2 COMING VERY SOON THOUGH.
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Dec 8, 2019 23:19
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Okay, this is much belated and I apologise. It’s been a crazy few weeks, and then the time I did set aside got eaten up by, well … I got hammered with a bunch of goons. Blame them. Also blame me. PART 2.1: PREPARING A FILE: MOTHERFUCKING INDESIGN * nb: Indesign/Sigil isn't the only way to prep a book file, but it's what I use professionally and there's good reason behind that, which we'll go into. Anyway, this is Adobe InDesign. It is—like every Adobe product—hilariously overpriced, a huge pain in the rear end to use, and also totally indispensable.  It was initially built to typeset books but has kinda blown past that at this point: graphic designers use it for layouts and the like. This means: 1) It has core functionality that let you do great book layouts 2) It has a Mariana Trench of graphic design stuff that is mostly useless for book layout and often makes it impossible to find what you’re looking for Before you begin making a book in InDesign, do the following: 1) Make sure your margins and pages are the right size. It’s totally possible to chain this later, it’s just soul-shreddingly fiddly and boring, and you’ll save yourself a massive headache if you set the file up correctly from day 1. 6x9 inches (152x229mm) is very popular right now, though that’s big, and I honestly like trade paperback a bit better (generally 136x216mm/5 3⁄8 × 8 1⁄2 in, though sizes vary)—they’re bigger than your airport novel, but they’re not the stonking great WHAM-ness of the 6x9. Also, the “right margin size” will vary wildly depending on your printer and page size, but the inner margin on the recto (righthand) page needs to be bigger by about 5–8mm: the pages on the right are going to get pulled further into the middle just as a product of how physical books are made. For the record, TDH is 152x229mm with 12.7mm margins with a cheeky guideline 17.7mm margin for the inner recto. 2) Go to your Type menu and find Character Styles and Paragraph Styles, then drag them over to the sidebar. Depending on how temperamental InDesign is feeling, you may need to do this a few times on boot before it realises you want them there permanently. If you are typesetting a book, Paragraph Styles is your single most important menu. Paragraph styles is your best friend. Half the questions people have about InDesign, the answer is ‘use Paragraph Styles’. Learn everything about it you can.  3) Go to your master pages (Pages menu is on the top right), and place a text box at the bottom of each that is the full width of the page, below the lower margin. Then go Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Current Page Number and put it in there. Going full-width is just more effective and less fiddly than centering them. You’ll notice that one is text width here and one is page width. There’s no reason for that, I’m just not following best-practice and my supervisor would be ashamed. This will happen a lot.  Set aside the following pages blank: 1) First page is the Full Title: that means book title, author’s name, publisher 2) Page 2 is the Imprint page: this is the legal one with the copyright/ISBN etc 3) Page 3 is the half title: same as the title page, but no author name or publisher details. This is optional, but it helps you start the story on the recto (which you want to do) 4) Page 4 is an attribution/quote/blank if there’s nothing to go here None of these should have page numbers. You can remove the page numbers (or any Master items) with Ctrl+Shift+left click to select, then just delete them as normal. That’s it? That’s everything you need to do before you put any text in, yes. Now, get your manuscript as a word doc and save it somewhere easy to find, then Ctrl+Shift+D. Select the file, then click the top corner of where you want the text to go, and it’ll add the entire manuscript, autogenerate pages and thread them, which is possible to do manually but is absolute drudgery—just hold down shift when you add the doc in the first place and save yourself two hours of mindless busywork. Threading means that each page flows onto the next, so if you delete/move things it’ll push text onto the next page rather than having it vanish into a computer hole and start throwing up errors. Okay What the gently caress, This is Awful Haha, welcome to InDesign, fucko. My perfect software child, my rear end in a top hat loser brat, I hate how much I love it. I can’t speak to your particular flavour of What The gently caress (InDesign, like the sea, is capricious) but generally the issue people run into is that all their formatting just went to hell. But don’t worry, because you’re about to learn why InDesign rules: you’re about to learn about Paragraph Styles.  Paragraph Styles are formats that you can configure then slap onto a particular paragraph. You wanna change every single font in the book on a whim? If your paragraph styles are set up correctly, you can do that in one click. gently caress, you wanna make only the titles and the last paragraphs of each scene hot pink and bold, four times as large, in Wingdings, underlined in yellow Japanese dots and with no hyphens? Like three clicks, my man. Welcome to my rear end in a top hat Kingdom. But that’s the trick, and that’s why I use it: if you’re willing to do all the annoying setup, InDesign makes modifying and testing poo poo an absolute breeze. True story: I once got asked to totally re-typeset a book of poetry the day before it went to print. It would’ve been days of work in any other software; it took 90 minutes. To add a paragraph style, click anywhere in the paragraph, then click on the name of the style from your menu. To create a style, click the hamburger menu you see in the top right of the PStyle menu up there then New Paragraph Style. When you click New Paragraph Style, one of the first things you’ll see is Based On. If you put another style in here, it becomes the parent of the new style; any changes to the parent apply the same changes to the child. You can chain styles like this so changing one thing about a single parent cascades throughout the doc. You can use this power for great good, but also for great evil and destruction: use it well. InDesign is meant to autogenerate paragraph styles based on the Doc. It does this, but it does it very poorly, and it gives them garbage names that are impossible to remember. Generally speaking, you want the following paragraph styles: 1) Body Main: your bread and butter. You can’t go wrong with a 12-point Garamond with a 5mm first-line indent. 2) Body First: the first paragraph of each scene. This is identical to body main, but doesn’t have an indent. 3) Body Last: End of a scene, same as Body Main, but give it 5–10mm space after. 4) Chapter Head: even if you’re like me and are an rear end in a top hat who refuses to use chapters, you need a chapter head style—it’s how the epub conversion recognises scene breaks and believe me it’ll save you a massive headache later. Since TDH doesn’t have chapters, there’s a single line of white space between scenes, styled as Chapter Head. 5) Folio: for page numbers. Usually 6–7 point, italic, same typeface as the body text. It’s called that for mumblemumblehistoricalbookreasons? Okay, that’s it? That’s maybe 5% of what you can do with InDesign, but it’s the critical stuff you need to do to make a professional-looking book. There will be a lot of paragraph style tinkering and the like here and that will be the bulk of the work you do, but it’ll also vary wildly depending on what sort of book you’re typesetting and I hope I’ve given you enough background to let you experiment. Weeks pass, you’ve laid out your book, now you need to send it to the printers. All that’s left is to export it. That’s easy right? Ctrl+E, save as PDF, no worries mate. Oh no. Oh no, what fresh hell is this?  You want the following: 1) No compression, no optimization 2) Export as Spreads 3) Marks and Bleeds > All Printer’s Marks, 3mm bleeds, no slug [ignore this if you’re prepping for Amazon] 4) Do not touch anything else unless you know what you’re doing That’s your print book done. There’s another reason we’re using InDesign though: turning this file into an eBook is … not easy, but significantly easier than it would be otherwise. Which leads us onto 2.2: Sigil, and eBook production. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Dec 10, 2019 |
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Dec 10, 2019 11:02
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