Tag Archives: book design

Producing a PDF for a Printer

Okay, so using a preformatted Word template, I did the page layout for Slave Labor, which just now exists solely in e-book form. By way of learning how to do it, I want to present the thing to a print-on-demand outfit, of which there happens to be one here in lovely uptown Phoenix.

Normally, when you prepare page layouts for a printer, your PDFs have to include what is called crop marks, which show the printer where the edge of the printed document will be, based on your book or brochure’s trim size. They look like this:

cropmarks-02Word has no function that will allow you to make these. So, a PDF created with Word’s “Save as PDF” command does not now and never will have crop marks.

To make them, you need to create the PDF with Adobe Acrobat Pro.

I happen to have a copy of Acrobat Pro on my handy-dandy MacBook, but the dear Apple folks rendered it nonfunctional with one of their endless effing updates. So it’s useless.

In response to Apple’s decision to invalidate an entire suite of software used by millions of graphic artists, most of whom own Macintosh hardware because said software works a lot better on a Mac than in Windows, Adobe moved its programs into the cloud.

You can still buy a copy of Acrobat Pro: $445. Or you can subscribe to it, to the tune of $15 a month.

This presents a problem or two or three…

1. Honestly. I don’t want to buy an expensive piece of software or commit to a year-long subscription unless I know I’m going to use it regularly and a lot. We’re still in the sandbox stage with this self-publishing adventure. I don’t know if or when the enterprise will show any sign of life. If it doesn’t return $445 (so far Slave Labor has netted a grandiose $9), buying it will cost my shirt.

2. Some printers do not require crop marks. I don’t know which do and which don’t, and I don’t want to approach the outfit I hope to work with until I have something to approach them with. Finished camera-ready PDFs.

3. At $15/month, the free-standing version would pay for itself in 30 months. Clearly, if my scheme to build a publishing empire quickly comes to naught (as most entrepreneurial schemes do), then I’d be better off to subscribe to the Acrobat’s cloud version. But… What if the self-publishing scheme works? Then a monthly subscription will soon add up to a huge waste of money. If the plan flies, I’ll need to software in-house, not off on someone else’s servers.

What it boils down to is, at this point,

a) one would be crazy to subscribe to Acrobat Pro; and
b) one would be crazy to buy Acrobat Pro.

We might call that the horns of a dilemma.

Since I’ll need to emit about eight or ten books, all of which are sitting in a queue waiting to be published, before I can know whether the plan is going to work, and because only three of them need to appear in hard copy very soon, we need a way around this dilemma.

Someone, somewhere must have Acrobat Pro and be willing to hire out for the tiny job of opening a Word file, clicking on two boxes in Acrobat’s “settings,” converting the file to PDF, and saving the result to disk.

So when I was over in the East Camelback district a day ago, I dropped by a FedEx office where my little editorial company does fairly regular business.

Sure, they said. They’d be happy to that conversion. Ten bucks a pop.

Well. That would be better than Adobe’s $15/month subscription if I crank out no more than one bookoid a month.

But right now we have not only the proposed PoD version of Slave Labor, we have How I lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, which is ready to go in e-book format and also should be produced in hard copy, and we have 18 serialized “books” generated from the FireRider novel, all of which in theory could be offered either as e-books or in hard copy. Plus once all the serials go online, I could in theory offer a “collector’s edition” of FireRider, publishing everything in one expensive volume.

I could easily put these things out at the rate of one a week, which is precisely what I intend to do.

At ten bucks a hit, I’d be better off to subscribe to Acrobat. And if the other novel in hand comes into being very soon, then I might as well buy the damn program.

So I called my honored graphic designer and whined about this state of affairs. He said he could make the conversions — no problem. And we discussed converting his cover design for the originally planned full-length FireRider into covers for each of 18 serials. He doesn’t seem to think it’ll be very hard, but…when I reached him yesterday he was knee-deep in another client’s project. So how soon we’ll get that under way remains to be seen.

He also said, though, that most printers demand crop lines only if the pages contain bleeds. If it’s all copy, the way most novels are, crop lines may not be necessary at all.

Amateur publishers across the Web report variously that some PoD publishers won’t look at your project unless you’ve generated PDFs with crop lines, and some will take PDFs without them.

 At any rate… It appears that if you can find someone to use Acrobat Pro to create your PDFs for a minimal amount — $5 per document or less — it would be cost-effective to hire the job out. At $10 per document: maybe not so much.

Three projects, one day, 24 hours: progress

Five to 9…what is that? A sixteen-hour day? And I’m knocking off early: normally would work till 11 p.m.

LOL! Back when I was a working stiff in the magazine industry, one of my editors used to say that freelance writing was grand because it allowed you to pick your work hours: any 18 hours of the day you please!

With the teaching antics temporarily in abeyance, several whole days have presented themselves for productive work.

And lacking too many interruptions, I’ve been able to do a little on each of the three projects in hand: Writing a new (more or less erotic) novel (shaping up to be a romance!); building a prospectus for the nonfiction Boob Book coping with decisions women have to make when confronted with a breast diagnosis); putting the completed Fire-Rider novel online in serialized form.

So: yesterday I wrote one of the appendices for the Boob Book: how to read a scientific paper. Next segment: a chapter on the screening controversies. Wrote a little on the new book. And spent several hours fiddling with the new template I hope to use for the 19 serial novelettes.

Half of today was consumed with a business meeting and a doctor’s appointment 25 miles from home: lots of time disappeared there. But between 5 and 6:30 ayem, I did squeeze in a paragraph or two of the new-old novel.

Later, back at the Funny Farm: it was back to the project of fitting Slave Labor into the proposed print-on-demand template. And ta-da! by the time the sun had been down an hour or two, the whole (little) book was pasted into the template, formatted in styles, and saved as a PDF.

The result is not bad. Not great, but not bad. It’s marginally professional. The problem is, of course, is that no matter how carefully you choose your fonts, Word is not quite up for the job of typesetting. BUT…for the purpose of cranking 5000-word penny-dreadfuls — many of them scribbled on order by flunkies willing to write erotica at an astonishing 2 cents a word  (!!!!!) — perfection is not a requisite.

Without Adobe Acrobat Pro (which I can’t afford), you can’t generate crop lines, so the PDF doesn’t make it obvious that the template is for a 5.5 x 8.5 trim size.

Joel Friedlander, the guy who cooked up this clever scheme, insists that many PoD printers can handle PDFs that have no crop lines. I’ll believe that when I see it. But if forced to it, probably my sidekick can extract a copy of Pro from her employer, the Chinese government, or the guys down at the FedEx shop will have it. One is never without resources.

Friedlander also has a cover design template, of all the astonishing things. You enter your image on the righthand side, figure and adjust the spine width, and enter your back cover copy on the left, in text boxes. Et voilà!

He proposes that one get an image sized to wrap all the way around, and in a video shows how to do that. Very nice, but I have a front cover image that I’ve already paid generously for, and it ain’t going away. So I figure either to leave cover 4 white, or to fill the spine and back cover with a color compatible with the dominant color scheme in the present design.

It’s going to be extremely interesting to see if this works. They say with the new digital PoD printers, which really are glorified computer printers with some capacity to perfect-bind whatever comes out, open all sorts of doors.

And now…I’m done in!

🙂