A New Wrinkle In Time
Monday, July 14th, 2008This travel book of mine, Hey Boomers, Dust Off Your Backpacks: Travel The World On A Limited Budget, is gradually taking shape and I’m aiming to send it to my printer, Lightning Source for POD (Print On Demand) publishing, before the end of July. But, a new glitch has just appeared. I don’t think it’s too serious.
As the book nears completion and the corrected manuscript becomes ready to send back to my editor for checking and putting into final shape, I find that she’s not equipped to convert the file into PDF which must be done before sending the material to the printer. Of course, I had hired her to do the copyediting, a prior step, and neither one of us thought this far ahead. However, when I downloaded instructions from Lightning Source and sent those to her, she realized that they require Adobe Acrobat for the file conversion and she doesn’t have that. It’s an expensive piece of software.
So, I will need to farm that task out as soon as I have a perfected manuscript. Okay. There must be people for hire to do that. It’s just one more step in the learning curve.
I sent Lightning’s cover template instructions to my cover designers at the same time and I hope there are no wrinkles in their ability to put that together in a form my printer can use. But they are a big firm, so I doubt if there will be a problem there.
So, this blog is the story of all of the steps that I’m discovering as I go along, which are necessary when one decides to publish their own book. Now, I find a new step just as I leave town for a few days. I think it will be easy to solve and rapid to achieve when I find someone with the right equipment. Not really a problem in all of the farming out of duties that lie behind the finished product.
I don’t think I have mentioned the acquiring of the ISBN number. That was easy but had to be done in advance in order to have it in time to give to my cover designers before they wrapped things up. It’s the bar code for the white space on the back and is assigned by bowker.com. Costly, at $275, but that is for a string of ten numbers, useful for all of the versions such as ebooks, audio books, large print, kindle, that I might also make of this title. Or, I can use up any remaining numbers on the next book I write. It makes no economic sense to buy a single ISBN number as the cost is far more.
There are quite a few of these numbers and symbols that you might apply for and add to the book, some of which state price, Library of Congress numbers, and designations used by book stores, each of which must be applied for independently. Publishing houses have whole departments to handle these details for each book. You don’t necessarily need them all if you are self-publishing and are not trying for the distribution to libraries and bookstores.
As I’m learning, every book is a real labor of love and can cost as much in time as it does in do-re-mi. It’s also quite easy to get pretty tired of the whole darned project before you have anything to show for it. But, this is birth and what pregnant woman doesn’t say the same things once in awhile?
lindajbrown