Tag Archives: print-on-demand formatting

This, That, & Publishing

Busy day coming up, but wanted to post a couple of updates:

The plan to publish a hard-copy version of the first Fire-Rider collection (books I-VI) developed into a more complicated project than expected. To make a long and exceptionally frustrating story short, the Wyrd template I used to lay out the pages corrupted — or else it’s PDF, which is unknown. It took quite a while to identify the problem, and once the problem was discovered, the solution required rebuilding a 371-page document from scratch.

Once that was done, though, the PDF and the cover loaded fine, I think. LOL! We’ll find out soon enough: when the page proofs get here, we can actually put our hot little hands on them. That should allow us to see any problems and fix.

The final cover came out reasonably well, I think.

FR Hard Copy 1 Take 3 LoRes. jpg

I cut the back cover blurb considerably; added a short pull-out (the italic passage). Instead of arranging the titles of books 1 thru 6 in a vertical list on the front cover, I set them horizontally, separated by bullets. They seem less distracting that way, yet they’re readable.

This book will not be sold on Amazon (at least, I have no plans to do so at this time). I’m having it printed to produce something to take to a shindig next month, where we’ll be invited to present our works.

However, if you would like a copy, I’d be happy to sell it from this site. Just leave a query as a comment to this post. It was expensive to produce — the page proofs, which are printed and bound like a final copy — came to over $11. So I’m afraid that retail price is going to have to be a little more than $11.99. However, JUST FOR YOU, and just for a limited period, I’ll offer it at that price through this website.

In the Racy Books for Racy Readers department, we’ll also have a hard-copy collection of the Family stories:

FAMILY pkg cover LoRes

This one is at the printer, too, for production of a proof. LOL! The book actually contains eight stories…that will have to be corrected on the back cover. And there, my children, is why we have page proofs! As you can see, I haven’t even placed a bar code on it, so little do I have any intention of peddling it on Amazon. Or in hard copy at all.

The final version of this one, which also will go to the December chivaree with me, probably will have the author’s byline centered above the title, with the words Eight and Stories shifted rightward accordingly. And I think I’ll put the imprint’s name — Camptown Races Press — in small type at the lower margin of the back cover, since I’m less than 100% thrilled with the logo I came up with.

At any rate, soon the book will exist. It’ll be a COLLECTOR’S ITEM, by golly! What a Christmas present!

If you’d like a copy of it, let me know — again, contact me through the comments section to this post. Printing cost for this was a little more sane. I think I can afford to sell it for about $10, providing about $2 profit.

So, come one, come all! The first Fire-Rider collection, $11.99 (a give-away!) and the first Racy Books collection, $10.

Puh-leeze, Reality: Out of my fantasy life!

What an unholy day!

Dropbox_logo_(September_2013).svgFor the past week or ten days, “Download Scrivener & figure out how to use it” has been at the top of the to-do list. And day after day after day, one quotidian thing after another has soaked up the hours.

Some of the were very nice quotidian things — frolicking with my friends, spending far more dollars than anyone in their right mind could afford — and others were survival tasks — shopping and cooking and cleaning and yard care and dog care and car care and student care and all that. But today, I thought, was the day.

Five a.m.: up and at ’em!

From: Associate Editor
Sent: Saturday, 11:59 p.m.
To: Editor
Subject: CLS Part I (Revisited) and Part II

Weird! I don’t see the DropBox folder. It [a new set of edits on an article I just returned to the client] was just minor formatting stuff. You probably caught it and if not I can fix it when the author returns the next version.

Uhm…minor formatting stuff? Uhhhmmmm…. Don’t see the Dropbox folder?

Really?

Seriously?

Call up DropBox. Yeah…the folder I uploaded is there. Why can’t she see it? Why, why, why…?

Explore around.

5:30 a.m.: Discover Drop-freaking-Box “is not running?”

Not. Running. NOT? RUNNING?

6:00 a.m.: “DropBox is not running” turns out to be a pretty common issue. There’s a fix: it’s complicated as hell and requires you to know how to write code for the Mac.

6:30 a.m.: Maybe the free space is about full. I’ve been using DB like a handy-dandy all-purpose hard drive. Haven’t backed up for a long time. And it’s kind of a mess. I need to clean this up and then figure out how to get the copy to the client and the kid but while we’re at it this means she hasn’t gotten any of the other stuff I’ve thought I was uploading to her.

Delete junk files. Move old stuff to “Documents” on Mac hard drive. Organize surviving files. Copy to flashdrives. Copy to hard disk. Clone to other computer’s hard disk. Back up to Time Machine.

Do battle with DropBox. Try a work-around that looks like a possibility and demands null coding skill. Takes for effing-ever. Doesn’t work.

Eventually, it develops that shutting down the computer and rebooting causes both terminals to reconnect with DropBox. Looks like the system is working.

E-mail the client and the side-kick to let them know all is well. Five minutes later, DropBox goes down again.

Nine and a half hours later, I got up from the computer. DB was still half-functional, the dogs hadn’t been walked, the pool needed to be cleaned, the duck was taunting the dogs, and I hadn’t had a thing to eat.

Scrivener was (once again) not downloaded. Nothing (once again) was learned about about how it works. Nary a document was loaded into this worthy program. Not a line was formatted for Kindle.

My career as a soft-core pornographer is doomed. {sigh}

Returned to the office after walking the dogs. An e-mail from “Mom” of Maybe Someone Should Write That Down awaited. A “like: from a Writers P&S post with a machine-generated “check out this post”recommend. And…well..

By golly! Check out this post!

Mom reports on a WordPress product called Pressbooks.com: This thing doesn’t just create e-book formats. It also does hard-copy layouts! The thing has got layout templates — some of them very nice templates.

It looks like you can go straight to the chore at hand — formatting something that’s already written, edited, and ready to go — rather than having to go through the process of learning how to learn Scrivener’s whole “writing” and organizing program and then figuring out how to export something written in all new code into .mobi et alii, and then hire someone to do the print-on-demand layout. Or figure out how to do that myself, too.

This has the look of a piece of cake. Maybe even a coconut cream pie!