Ouch — this
article is way overdue: when I sat down to finish it, I saw I'd
half written it back in February. Sorry! (In hindsight, I
suspect I subconsciously realised it was going to be a long article
and require a fair effort to finish, so I kept putting it off. I've also
been very busy with writing and everything related to that.)
This article is about
preparing a print edition of your book — which is a little more work
than preparing the ebook edition for a novel
that's not illustrated. Although there are significant differences
for a printed edition, there are more things in common; so if some of
these details look a bit sketchy, hopefully it's because I've covered them in
my article about preparing the ebook edition — the two pieces are
companion articles.
Here's a link to
my earlier article about preparing the electronic edition: Adventure #1 in publishing: Creating the ebook!
Because this post is so long, I thought I'd better break it up into sections, and provide a table of contents:
Here's
a short list
of the new things
you'll need to do, or
may choose to do, and what
this rather lengthy article covers:
New
ISBN, PDFs
for print edition, adjusted
layout, CIP (kind of),
costing info, return policy, discount, copyright, page
numbers, left vs right layout, font size, costing info, proof
copy, dates.
The reason I go into the detail I do here, is to try to capture
most of what I've learned; so it's helpful for me and my
imperfect memory, and I hope it will be of use to others. This
article is unusually long; so rather than considering it as something
to read from start to finish, it may make more sense to treat it as
something to refer to if you're looking for an answer to a specific
question. I wrote it, and I found it tediously long to read!
But I think it'll be handy in five months time when I produce the
print version for Volume 3.
Key differences in print vs electronic
I'll
try to note all the differences between the print and digital
editions of a book. My dream is to have a single electronic version
of my book(s), and an automated process for generating both an ebook
edition and each
print edition; but currently I have a separate file for each. I
try to be rigorous in
ensuring
each has the same content. When
I make improvements in one
edition, I make them in
each other addition, at
the same time.
New ISBN
Assuming you've
bought one or more ISBNs, you need to choose a fresh ISBN to
associate with this edition of your book. I've discussed ISBNs
before when I wrote about "Preparing to Hit the Publish Button",
but it's useful I think to go over it again in the context of a print
edition, and perhaps with some missing details filled-in, too. Each
physically different edition requires its own unique ISBN. But if
you make substantive changes (more than just corrections), you should
really use a new ISBN to distinguish the new edition. Check your
nation's guidelines on their expectations in this area.
If you buy a block
of ISBNs it makes it easier for book cataloguing databases around the
world to decide your books are related (they tend to assume
publishers have runs of sequential ISBNs). It also hugely reduces
the per-ISBN cost.
Since I'm in
Australia and the ISBN assignments are managed here by Thorpe-Bowker
(https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/)
I log in and visit My Profile
(https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/myaccount_myprofile).
There, under the "My Account" drop-down I choose "Manage
ISBNs".
Currently
I have several
ISBNs
set
aside for Wild Thing. I assigned
the
first one
to the
ebook edition, since I published that first. I've reserved other
ISBNs for other editions
(5"x8" pbk, 4.25"x7"
pbk, large print, but
I'm
even
considering
a
UK
English spelling edition,
and a
dyslexic-friendly
ebook, and
even a hard-cover). Choosing to publish all those variants would
probably be excessive, so perhaps reserving five ISBNs for Wild Thing
is more than reasonable for now! I've been keeping track of what
ISBN I assigned to each
edition in an email to myself. I'm unsure whether it'd be more
sensible to use a spreadsheet. Of course, Thorpe-Bowker keep track
of what I've assigned; but they don't know what I'm planning, so I
think it's sensible to keep track of it myself, too.
Do
you have URLs?
If
you mention a web site in your text (such as a link to your author
web site), then in the print edition, remember to spell out the
actual
URL; though if it starts with "http://" you can safely omit that.
If you used
colour text
for
hyperlinks in
your
ebook, change the text style to
use black
text in
the
print edition (unless you've opted for some colour for the insides,
rather than B&W).
Spine tips
The
vast majority of books print the text of the spine running "down":
that is, you tilt your head to the right to read the words left to
right (in roman script, at least). Have a skim of some bookshelves
if you need to check this.
Also,
if you are writing a series of books, give some thought to where the
volume number should appear (readers really appreciate being easily
able to sequentially order the books, so do include a number), and
the title and author. These should line up nicely when shelved, so
your books are pleasing to look at.
Typeface and font size
In
other words, legibility and ease of reading. Unlike the ebook, your
decision here may as well be carved in granite, since your readers
certainly can't increase the font size if they have trouble. It's
not hard to pick a typeface that suits the style of the book and is
easily readable, but do put careful thought into the choice for the
print edition in particular.
I've
heard people claim that a sans-serif font (like Helvetica or Arial)
is just as readable for long blocks of text as the serif fonts
normally used
for this (Time Roman, Garamond, etc.), and that there is no
scientific evidence
one way or the other.
I
beg to differ. That flies in the face of reason (since the tiny
details provided by the serifs are not there for decoration, they're
subtle clues carefully
created by expert type designers
to help our marvellous pattern-recognising brains identify letters in
an instant); it's also
contrary
to my personal experience; and more tellingly, Carnegie Mellon
University researched this topic more
than thirty years ago and
published several papers. Their
conclusion?
Serif
text was preferable to sans-serif for long pieces of text. I know
this
because my wife, a PhD in English and a professional technical writer
of excellent skill, paid for copies of the research when the question
came up, early in
her career.
Your choice of
typeface will affect how much space your text requires, and thus how
many pages and therefore also the cost. And if you want a special
font that's not provided as part of your computer system, beware
that if you want to license the rights to use it for publishing
books, the cost is likely to be exorbitant. I investigated the use
of Garamond, but gave up when I realised it would cost me several
hundred (or was that a thousand?) dollars each year.
The
reason I preferred Garamond over Times
Roman was that, as
well as simply being a beautiful and readable typeface, remarkably,
it was as tightly set or tighter. I
think its readability is due to its greater
"x height" (the size given to the lower case letters, basically),
which
makes
the font appear bigger overall. But I think Gentium and Georgia are
very pleasant alternatives. Google and others have also
produced
a large range of good typefaces for free. Whatever you choose, do
check the licence to make sure you're allowed to use it for your
book.
Layout
Similar
to the typeface and size you choose, give careful thought to the line
spacing. If you pack the lines too densely, the text will be either
awful to read, or — if you get it only slightly too tight —
subtly draining to read. Neither of which you want for your readers.
I
made the initial mistake of using no indentation for the first line
of my paragraphs, opting
instead for
an increased gap. Traditionally published books don't do that:
they maintain a consistent and pleasant line spacing, and indent the
1st
line of each paragraph.
They
do this because it's just as easy to see that a new paragraph has
started, but
greatly reduces the number of pages required for the same text. That
translates to saving more trees and lowering costs which you can pass
on to your readers.
Page numbers
Unlike the eBook edition, you'll
need page numbers, naturally. (Amazon will automatically strip page
numbers if you have them in your .mobi file, I found, so I think it
makes sense to leave them in by default). But where to place them?
You can
save considerable space, and reduce the page count, by including the
page number in the header rather than reserving space in the footer
of each page. If you do this, it's normal to place the number on
the outer margin (i.e. leftmost, on left hand pages, and rightmost on
right hand pages).
In the header, it's normal to
alternate left and right pages with the author's name, and the book
title. Sometimes in a smaller font, so it's not distracting.
Leave enough space between it and the body of the page so it doesn't
look like the page's text starts with the header!
Of course, you need a different page
layout for left and right pages, since you need the margins to be
mirror images of one another, because (generally speaking) you need
more space on the edge of the page that joins the spine, simply
because the pages curve in tightly together. There's nothing more
irritating than not being able to read the text without splitting the
book in two, or having to peer into the gutter to try to see the
letters! And as well, you need to alternate Title vs Author on left
and right, as well as placement of the page number if you've
included it there, too.
It's worth a flip through to check
that all your left hand pages use the left-hand header and footer,
and likewise for the right hand pages.
Oh! And remember that page one must be
a right-hand page, or you'll look like you don't know what you're
doing.
Colour: text and paper
If you used some colour text for some
reason in your digital edition (e.g. to make chapter titles stand
out), then assuming you're opting for B&W interior the print
edition, remember to change them to black.
Your printer may offer you choices of
cream or white for the internal pages, and matte or glossy finish to
the paper. Choose whatever you prefer, and can afford. My own taste
runs to the cream colour non-glossy paper, simply because that's
what looks normal to me from most paperback and hardbacks I've read
(textbooks aside).
Binding
Perfect binding is not as durable as
saddle-stitching, but it's far less expensive. While early
generation print on demand systems had problems in durability, I
think those days are long past now. The quality of print on demand
books (at least, from my personal experience with Ingram Spark; as
well as the claims of other printers) matches that of offset printing
in massive runs. The price of each POD book is dropping slowly, too,
approaching that of offset printing, but without the huge financial
risk of printing thousands of books.
Incidentally, that massive up-front
investment is, I think, the core reason for many, many aspects of the
business model followed by the traditional publishing industry.
Table of Contents
I think it's
unusual to include a table of contents in a printed book if it's
fiction (the reverse is true for non fiction), but if you've given
chapters interesting or descriptive names, it's not that unusual to
include a ToC. And if your book is broken up into "Parts" or
"Books" an abbreviated ToC listing just those is not that
unusual.
PDF files for print
For the printed book, most
publishers/printers want two PDF files: one for the cover design, and
one for the rest of the book (the insides, if you will). PDF is a
well-designed and well-understood standard, though it is complex.
You need to check out what your publisher/printer wants, and follow
that exactly. It's very likely they'll have a template for you to
follow. They'll need to know the page count, too: the more pages,
the wider the spine (and the greater the printing cost, of course).
Chances are, they'll have a web page where you enter the page count,
and it'll tell you how wide the spine will be.
I'll talk about the cover in a
minute, but let's address a few obvious details for the PDF used
for the contents: i.e. all those pages filled with the words you've
slaved over.
A subtlety I hadn't observed
initially was that the first page of every chapter normally omits the
page number; likewise for any pages that stand between "parts" or
major sections of a book. And doing this in LO is slightly tricky,
since you can't change a page's style after you've introduced a
page break. You need to have defined at least one page style that
omits footers and/or headers (as appropriate for your placement of
the page #); then you have to delete the page break, then re-insert a
"Manual break..." (not Page break), this time choosing "Page
Break" together with the page style you've defined for
this new page.
Making the PDF files
For the contents,
when
using LibreOffice, this is
as simple as choosing the Export to PDF option. I think it's sensible
to choose 100% for the JPEG compression quality, and to only select
the "Archive PDF/A-1a (ISO 19005-1)" for the PDF format, and
"Export automatically inserted blank pages", for the General
options: tagged PDF and bookmarks and comments are irrelevant for a
printed edition. The blank pages are to ensure that the correct pages
appear on the correct sheets. I think selecting that will ensure
that each
odd page appears
on the right-hand side page, and each
even page on the left — provided you're using a sensible template
that has margins set correctly for the odd and even pages.
For the cover,
I think you're expected to be using a Windows or MacOS system, and
therefore able to use some expensive special-purpose program like
Adobe InDesign or PhotoShop. My cover designer has those, and did
prepare the cover, but since I didn't know the exact number of pages
(which determines the thickness of the spine), I needed to adjust it
later.
The
free software Inkscape is both reasonably easy to use, has good
how-to and help information available, and produces both SVG and PDF
files, and I
initially chose
that: a mistake, in
hindsight. (Another option
is The GIMP, but I personally find its UI diabolically
counter-intuitive; it's probably as powerful and capable as
Photoshop, but for me the learning curve was too steep. And
it suffers from the same key limitation as Inkscape.)
The problem was that IngramSpark's
quality-check reported the PDF files had two errors that needed
correction. One was the inclusion of transparent objects (I think
LibreOffice generates some spurious invisible transparent object) and
also an image with low resolution (I think that was the QR code,
which is just a blocky PNG image, that does not need to be high
resolution). The report said that they could fix these, so I ticked
the box that requested them to go ahead and do so.
Eproofs
I checked the eproofs that IngramSpark
delivered to me, carefully. One awful error (mine) was a missing
blank page at the very start, meaning page 1 was on the left! I fixed
that quick-smart.
For the PDF for the inside contents,
assuming it's all black and white, I think any kind of PDF file (in
which the text is encoded as text — not as images!) should be fine.
The PDF produced directly from LibreOffice is very good.
The story is very different, however,
when CMYK colour is included in the picture.
Cover PDF and CMYK
For the cover, since that's going to be
in colour, you need to know whether the printing/publishing company
wants the artwork in the CMYK colour space used by their press (Cyan
Magenta Yellow and blacK), or in RGB (Red Green Blue) as you'd want
for the ebook cover.
A very brief note
about CMYK vs RGB: CMYK represent "subtractive colours" produced
by ink or paint absorbing light; e.g. yellow ink absorbs all visible
frequencies except yellow, so that's the colour you see. Whereas
RGB colours are "additive colours", used by TVs and monitors,
produced by tiny glowing red, green or blue dots on the screen,
emitting light. E.g. on screen, red and green together produce
yellow.
And two important consequences are that
1) although both colour models produce mostly the same colours, each
one also has a large number of colour that cannot be represented by
the other colour model; and 2) if you put too much ink onto paper
(e.g. if you had 100% cyan, 100% magenta, 100% yellow, and 100%
black: a total of 400%), you end up with a "coverage" that
probably exceeds what the paper will soak up, and bad things can
happen: ranging from warping of the paper, colours running, or the
page becoming brittle and prone to cracking. Your printer will
advise you of the limits they require: e.g. the "US coated (SWOP)
v2" is a common "ICC colour profile" that limits ink coverage
to 240%.
Because the spine is part of the cover,
and its width depends on the number of pages and on the paper stock
you choose, your printing company should provide you with a template
file that shows exactly where they expect the front cover, spine, and
back cover to be, and their dimensions. (And inside flaps, if you're
producing a wrap-around cover for a hardback.) Alternatively, they
might simply tell you those dimensions: if so, you need to create the
artwork to follow that exactly. As well, you'll need a barcode
that represents your ISBN (often, the printing/publishing company
will include that in the template they provide you). The template
file they provide you will typically be a PDF (an international
standard), or in InDesign (a proprietary Adobe format), or something
else.
In practice, if your printer/publisher
requires CMYK colours specified, this means you must generate either
a file of type PDF/X (which is also called PDF/X-1a), or PDF/X-3. I
believe PDF/X requires every graphic object encoded in the file to
use a CMYK colour space, whereas PDF/X-3 allows objects to
individually specify an RGB or a CMYK colour space.
This may
be a good point to mention a
couple of technical pages that argue:
That
printers should accept RGB and handle the conversion to CMYK
themselves — see
http://indesignsecrets.com/import-rgb-images-indesign-convert-cmyk-export.php
(including all the comments!), and
Be careful about trusting Acrobat's CMYK coverage reports
—
http://creativepro.com/why-you-cant-trust-acrobats-separation-preview/.
Which is all well and good, but I think that may ignore some
practical considerations: if your printer tells you they need PDF/X
files, then they almost certainly do, and that's what you should
give them.
Check with your printer/publisher:
IngramSpark required a CMYK PDF file for the cover. The problem I
found when I received my proof copy of the book after I used Inkscape
with CMYK images to naively try to produce a "PDF with CMYK
colours", was that the colours were oversaturated and also appeared
to have a greenish tinge washed through it. I think this was a
consequence of working with CMYK-encoded JPEG images, but saving out
to a PDF file that was marked as having sRGB colour space. (Inkscape
does not currently support export of CMYK PDF files.) I also had my
name much too close to the edge of the cover. I needed to fix both
these issues. In the meantime, though, I'd developed a most unusual
problem with my Linux system, and to straighten it out I reinstalled
it with a bleeding-edge version. Unfortunately, I then found that
Inkscape had a bug in the conversion of CMYK JPEG images on 64-bit
systems, and inverted the colours! This forced me to use the RGB
images which Mirella had provided me for the ebook edition, then
cross my fingers and hope for the best! It seemed to work okay for
the 5"x8" edition that I released in Jan/Feb 2016, though I think
even then IngramSpark warned me there might be problems.
Danger, Will Robinson!
In October, when I was preparing my 4.25"x7" (A-format)
paperback edition of Wild Thing, I received a fresh report from
IngramSpark that the cover
was problematical: most of it exceeded the recommended 240% coverage,
although it was within the 300% absolute limit for their printing
presses. They advised me that they could print it, but the picture
might crack due to the density of ink.
The reason this happened was that I'm using Linux as my desktop
operating system (so: most software is free, bugs tend to be fixed if
you report them, and you don't have to worry about viruses) but a
few popular programs are not available for it. At the time, I'd
been using Inkscape to prepare (crop, resize) my covers, using the
artwork provided to me by my cover designer (hi, Mirella!).
But Inkscape currently can't create a
PDF with a CMYK colour profile. It was not a matter of just putting a
CMYK .JPG file into Inkscape and saving as PDF. And, apart from
text, Inkscape also insists on rendering all objects (using the Cairo
graphics engine), instead of just encoding each object for PDF and
letting the PDF compositing model handle the rendering. (It probably
does this so it can use the same rendering engine for screen and for
creating the PDF file, so it's simpler for them.)
Scribus to the rescue
In October, with more time up my
sleeve, I investigated properly. With the help of someone at
IngramSpark, who very patiently answered my technical questions, I
was able to work out the cause of the problem (short answer: not
producing a PDF/X file), and went searching again. This time I found
one free software package that does very good desktop publishing
including generation of PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3 files. It's also
available for MacOS and Windows. It's called Scribus
https://www.scribus.net/, has a good and comprehensive manual, and
very importantly, their web site provides information on where to
download "ICC colour profiles". And since IngramSpark had
helpfully shown me they used "US coated (SWOP) v2", the Scribus
web site made it easy to find and install that file on my system.
I won't go into the details of how to
use Scribus. The key thing to know is that you draw by inserting an
image frame to hold an image, or a text frame to hold text, and so
on, and then import files to fill those frames with content.
(Scribus also has quite a good, simple, and feature-rich text editor,
although it's a little bit clunky to use.) And the 2nd
key thing to note is that you need to install some ICC colour
profiles before you start it up, so the option to enable Colour
Management is available. You can then configure the PDF export to
use one of the CMYK colour profiles you've provided. From that
point, Scribus will handle the conversion of your images into the
colour space you've nominated when you export to PDF. This is true
even if you've turned on the option to show you when you've used
colours that are "out of gamut" or too dense: converted to fit
within the colour space you've chosen.
Scribus worked really, really well. It
even imported the .psd (Photoshop) artwork files with the CMYK images
that Mirella had provided me. I carefully read the Scribus manual
first, though, and it did take me two days to learn to use it well
enough to produce the new version of the cover, some new business
cards, and some pamphlets.
Scribus has been pretty stable and
complete as of 2012. Give it a try!
Trim, bleed, registration
Because the physical pages are trimmed
after they're physically bound together to get those nice crisp
edges we all love, the printer will need you to design something that
includes a margin of error, since some physical movement is
inevitable. These are called the trim edges, and the amount you go
past the trim boundary is the bleed amount: basically, you want to
put some pleasing but non-critical artwork in these areas which you
won't mind losing if the cover is not cut exactly along the
notionally correct edge. Don't put horizontal lines near your
horizontal page edges, nor vertical lines near your vertical edges,
in case it's printed very slightly askew: the narrower such a gap is,
the more obvious any error in alignment will look to the human eye.
The printer may provide you a
barcode graphic that represents the ISBN you have assigned to your
book: position this where your publisher/printer
recommends, and don't re-size
it! If they don't give you
the barcode image, you can
get free software that will convert an ISBN to a barcode graphic.
Thorpe-Bowker will also do it for you, for a small fee.
QR codes
It occurred to me it would be a
good idea to include a URL in the text that
pointed
readers to
the print edition; and to also add a QR code alongside the barcode on
the cover, that simply
encoded that URL for easy scanning by a smartphone. For the URL, I
used Bookshow.me
(as explained in "Preparing
to press the "Publish"
Button", under Marketing Plan) to
"globalise" the
URL provided by
Amazon, and to generate the
QR code I simply
used a free Linux tool
(<a
href="https://launchpad.net/qreator">qreator</a>)
and its
graphical front-end (<a
href="https://launchpad.net/qr-tools">qtqr</a>).
(Later,
I changed over to using a command line tool, qrencode.) I
then just saved the .PNG file and pasted that into the cover design
alongside the barcode provided by IngramSpark.
A problem with this approach is
that it just directed
people to the ebook version,
not a place to reorder the print edition, but I
felt that was
the best choice before I
knew
a
URL for people to buy the print editions. I had
hoped
I to link to them from my Amazon page; in
the end, this happened automatically (I think because I spent the
modest sum IngramSpark requested, to "advertise" the book).
The problem with this
approach is that buyers are likely to just go straight to Amazon and
if they want the print edition, assume they must buy it from there.
Which is fine in the US, since it can be printed there, and it's
possibly okay for the
UK, too, for the same reason. But in all the other countries in
which IngramSpark print, so it can be shipped locally, all you're
doing is leading your readers to pay more and wait longer for it to
arrive.
Incidentally, you can decode a QR
image you've created just as easily via the "zbarimg" tool,
part of the free "zbar-tools" package on Linux. That's
how I can easily tell you what I used for my reader-friendly QR code
for finding the books.
After
the data for the print editions rippled out into the distribution
channels, a google search turned out to be a simple way to locate
local booksellers who would order the book in for you if you asked
(and usually, allowing online ordering). So I changed the search
string to do that; and found that "qrencode"
also had options that allowed me to create a 300dpi image file. So
as an example, here's the command I used to generate the QR-code
for Harsh Lessons, with 20pixels per QR "dot" and 300dpi
resolution. Note that "%22" and "+" turn into a double-quote
and a space respectively, when used in a URL:
qrencode -o
QR-code-HarshLessonsBuyGoogleSearch.png --size=20
--dpi=300
\
"https://www.google.com.au/#q=%22L.J.+Kendall%22+%22Harsh+Lessons%22+buy"
So
you can see I've just encoded a string which does a Google search for
‘"L.J. Kendall"', ‘"Harsh Lessons"', and
‘buy':
literally: ‘"L.J. Kendall" "Harsh Lessons"
buy'.
Initially, I omitted the "buy"
search term, but now that my books have gained some reviews, if I
omit that qualifier the search mostly returns reviews; with "buy"
included the search turns up a mix of places to buy the book, and
reviews — and that seems good to me.
Business stuff
Proof
copy
Ahhh, the joy of receiving your
baby in physical form! Yes, order a proof copy. Then give it yet
another proof read. I find
that each time I read my book in a new mode, I see different errors.
(I check it first on
my desktop's
screen; then as a PDF
loaded onto a tablet;
then printed on paper as A5 booklets stapled
in groups of 16
sheets; then the real book).
You could probably avoid all
that by paying for a professional proofread/copy-edit! Anyway, I
found several more small continuity errors, several typos, and
decided to change to US-style
punctuation for
dialogue
(the punctuation goes inside the quotation, instead of treating the
quotation as a thing-in-itself), and
about 150 sentence-level tweaks to slightly improve wording or
clarity. It's funny what you see when you're holding a physical,
printed book. I also noticed that some chapter titles had
abnormally-little spacing below: I tracked this down to reducing the
line spacing for the entries in the Table of Contents (which were
still marked as Level 1 Headings), and this somehow carried over to a
few of the chapter titles I had edited here and there through the
book.
I'm also so
glad I opted for the cream coloured paper rather than white. And I
was enormously happy with the Georgia font, which is wonderfully easy
to read, with much larger x-heights than Times Roman at the same
nominal point size.
Launch
date
At some date your book will be
ready to go on sale. Allow enough time for your book's
publication information to filter out into the sales channels. Book
sellers keep databases of books available, indexed by ISBN and other
details. I don't know the details about how the meta-data for your
book is disseminated so it lands in these databases, but what I did
was provide all the required information to the ISBN provider (in my
case, in Australia, this was Thorpe-Bowker), and similar kind of
information for the Cataloguing-In-Print
people in the government. In addition, the printer/distributor
IngramSpark offer an option to "advertise" your book: my guess is
that they push the information out to all their partners, too. I
think I set a date three weeks after I felt the book would be ready.
I really have little idea what the ideal period of time would be!
Registering your copyright
In my earlier article, I thought the national body for managing
and recording copyright in Australia was the <a
href="https://members.copyright.com.au/">COPYRIGHT
AGENCY</a>. Their website states "We're a not-for-profit
that provides simple licensing solutions to allow you to use
copyright-protected words and images. Fees from licences are paid to
our creator members." And adds "Our core function is to license
users of copyright material to make reproductions and communications
of copyright works under appropriate provisions of the Copyright Act
1968, and to distribute money collected fairly and equitably to
copyright owners and creators."
There's also the Australian Copyright Council,
http://www.copyright.org.au/,
which seems similar; but they seem to be independent.
I think they're more related to allowing some fair use
reproduction of copyright material under license, with some
compensation paid to members than with lending rights. I think I was
getting confused with the government organisation related to lending
books in public libraries and institutions.
Lending
Rights (ELR/PLR)
If
libraries buy books, they make some payments that
are collected and apportioned fairly to
the authors of the books. By
registering each of your printed
books
with the
government's lending rights organisation (in Australia, this is
https://www.arts.gov.au/funding-and-support/lending-rights),
you give yourself the chance to be paid, should any libraries opt to
buy your books for their shelves.
So,
provide all the information for your book; and as you publish more
books, remember to return to the copyright agency and register the
new books. If your
book does get included in some libraries, then you might earn some
small income through a scheme set up for that purpose. To be
eligible, though, you need to apply for and Electronic
and/or Publisher Lending Rights: ELR
and/or PLR. In Australia, it's a straightforward process which
is open to indie and
self-publishers, but only for
print books (not for ebooks).
If you're self-published,
you should apply and register for each of your books as both Creator
and Publisher.
If indie published, then obviously you only apply as the creator
(your publisher should apply for the publisher rights). And you
should specify
the royalty split just as
you have agreed with your
publisher. Contact
them via their web site, and they should provide you a "Claimant
No." and corresponding password as a creator (and a separate
claimant number and password if you're also a publisher). Then you
need to login (at https://lendingrights.arts.gov.au/lendingrights/)
and provide all the
required details for your printed book(s) as creator (and again,
separately as publisher, if you're self-published: logging out as
creator then back in as the publisher).
Obviously this is
an optional step, and perhaps even an overly optimistic one. But,
who knows?
LCCN
The
US assigns
a Library of Congress Catalog Number
to each
book it holds a
copy
of. Most other countries use the Cataloguing-In-Print record: see
below.
For
an LCCN, the picture is different: whether a book is accepted into
the Library of Congress is up to their librarians. And I believe you
can't obtain it after the book is published. Nor does it make much
difference to you as an author, I believe. Reports
also
seem
to vary about whether indie publishers are accepted or not. But
instead, in the US you might consider obtaining a PCN (Pre-assigned
Control Number). Again, I think this is easy and cheap or even free
to apply for: beware of companies offering to sell or obtain an LCCN
or PCN for you.
I
gather that if a librarian anywhere
in the world decides
they'd like your book in their library, they'll search their
databases: if they find it, they'll use that
entry (maybe tweaking it); if they don't, then they may type up an
entry and add it into the database, where it can be seen by everyone.
I think the key advantage of doing it yourself is:
You
save a librarian a few minutes work, and
You
probably have a better idea of the categories your book falls into
than a librarian who may not have yet read your book.
That's all.
CIP/PCN
This
isn't a number: it's
a block of text with human-readable fields that
you can request from your National Library Association. It's used
by librarians to help find
books. I think it's well worthwhile obtaining a CIP: the only cost
is that you are obligated to provide a print copy of your book to
your
national library.
Categorising your
book
When
applying for the CIP (or PCN), the national body's website (in
Australia: Thorpe-Bowker) will present you with online forms which
you simply fill in. As part of that, they'll provide an option to
choose the categories and sub-categories that best describe
your book. It makes good
sense to do this honestly and with careful thought. The hierarchy of
categories is quite deep. I suspect doing this may improve the
discoverability of your book in the databases accessed by book
stores, and through more general online search engines.
When you fill in
the required information on the Thorpe-Bowker site after logging in,
they provide options to set the Primary Subject and Secondary. For
The Leeth Dossier, I've as the general themes I selected Fiction —
Science Fiction General and Fiction — Fantasy General. It's
in these tabs that you fill out details such as whether it's an ebook
or a print edition, including format/size. After that, you can drill
down to provide a much more detailed categorisation. The hierarchy
is long and goes down to about five levels in some areas: I expect it
ties into the Dewey Decimal classification system.
You can and should
use exactly the same categories for the print edition and an ebook
edition. It might be wise to make a note of the categories you've
identified, when you first do it, to make it easier to pick the same
categories for the other edition. But it also pays to have a browse
around the category hierarchy to double-check you haven't omitted
an important category.
I
noticed I hadn't updated my Thorpe-Bowker ISBNs with the details for
the planned 4"x7" edition. Thorpe-Bowker make it easy to
copy the edition details to a new ISBN via their "clone"
button: after clicking on that, you simply select the ISBN that you
want the details copied into, and then you're presented with a page
to make the changes needed
to
distinguish this edition from the others. Two
oddities I noticed here: even though Wild Thing is Volume 1 in the
series, and there is an option to provide information about the
volume no. when a book is part of a series, if you choose that
option, it won't allow you to enter a "1" to say it's the
first volume. And if you leave it blank, it complains that you must
provide a number greater than 1. So I don't see how you can tell
Thorpe-Bowker
that a book is volume 1. And if your book has no illustrations (not
counting the title), then you can't enter "0" for number of
illustrations, you have to leave it blank. Go figure: perhaps they
need a usability expert to give their website a slight
overhaul. It's very workable and functional, all the same, and
that's the main thing.
Money
You also need to put some careful
thought into the price to
charge for your print edition, when it will be released, and so on.
A particularly important decision here is the discount you will give
book stores, and whether you will allow "returns".
Money (returns)
To
manage the financial risk a book store will
only stock a book, if the
publisher allows "returns": that is, after a time, the store may
return unsold copies to the publisher and be refunded the cost of the
books. But as well, the publisher (not the store) will pay the
return shipping cost. (Sometimes,
if it's cheaper to destroy unsold copies than return them, the
agreement may allow that, instead.)
For a self-publisher, allowing
"returns" could
be a costly mistake,
unless you have a massive readership. So it's far safer to
disallow returns. The downside is that few book stores will stock
your book. (Some, more flexible, may decide to do so: ordering small
numbers as long as it sells, and taking the risk that if people stop
buying it, they'll have to sell off any remaining copies at a
discount, or just get rid of it. And then, probably stop ordering
any more.)
But the book should still make its way
into the databases, and should turn up as able to be ordered on
demand from book stores.
Pricing
(discount)
To have any chance at all of your
book being ordered by book stores, they need to be able to make a
profit in doing so. This will be easier if they order more than one
copy, since the processing and delivery cost will be spread over
several books, instead of concentrated in just one. But if they
prefer just to order a single copy when a customer orders your book,
they'll need to cover the delivery and their own internal costs.
For these reasons, you need to provide a discount for book stores.
This ranges from 30% to 55%, typically. The higher the discount, the
more attractive your book will be to the stores; but the less you
make.
I can't advise you on that, other
than to say, think about it carefully, look at what similar books
cost, and discuss it with friends who understand business and sales.
But do protect yourself: don't set the price so low that you lose
money by selling your book!
Nor can I advise you on pricing
or number of copies if you opt for offset printing of a single
initial print run. Just be aware that you'll need to store all the
books you ordered, and pay for the postage as you sell each one, and
spend time addressing and mailing them (or delivering them in bulk to
resellers), and dealing with problems if books go missing in transit.
Personally, I'm very happy to be using print on demand and leaving
it to Ingram Spark to handle
all that for me. It gives me more time for writing.
Here's a useful URL,
although it doesn't
cover the topic of setting
the price:
http://mediashift.org/2013/05/the-real-costs-of-self-publishing-book/
And here's a longer article that covers different ground to that article, and to this one too — though there's some overlap —
Duke Diercks's 1st person account of self-publishing tips and costs. Check it out, it's well worth a read. I'm not sure I agree with the idea of paying someone else to apply for your (P)CIP, but leaving that one exception aside, there are some real gems in there — like the idea about selling into small book-stores! I think Duke's article is actually more digestible than this whopper of a post.
Dates
You need to decide
a release date, too: don't set all this up the night before the
book is first available for printing. Traditional publishers handle
this very well, with carefully planned marketing campaigns before the
release date, all with the aim of getting as many sales as possible
when the book is released. Of course, the down side is that for the
vast majority of traditionally
published authors, this
marketing campaign will be a one week or two week effort that runs
once only, ever. In
contrast, for an indie author
who has chosen print on demand, your book will always be available
and it's up to you how you choose to market it as well as how long
for.
Review
copies
In
many ways, it's much easier and
cheaper
to send ebooks to people for review, but professional reviewers for
traditionally published books (such as in major newspapers and
magazines), tend
to
prefer
a free printed copy, though
of course
there's no guarantee they'll write a review at all. Their
time, after all, is precious. But
at least with a print edition you have a chance of that happening,
which — if the review is positive! — could lead to a big success
for you.
Put
care and effort into this, though: do your research to find what kind
of books different reviewers prefer, and only send your book to
someone who might appreciate it. And obviously, any note you send
along with your review (a press release) should be as clear and
succinct and as useful to the reviewer as possible. But this topic
is now leading into the general area of marketing, at which I'm
still very much a novice, as well as drifting off topic for this
post.
National
library
Remember
to send off a print copy of your book to your national library, if
you received a CIP or PCN (or LCCN)!
Tell people
From the contacts list you've created, send out the information to
each group. Then follow through on your marketing plan.
Summary
Prepare the cover and content PDF files for your book as carefully
as you can, to make the book as readable and beautiful as you can;
make sure you buy and assign an ISBN to it; register the book with
the appropriate bodies; check your work carefully after you've done
each piece of it; and carefully categorise your book and make it easy
for potential readers to find it.
And then, give yourself a well-earned pat on the back, relax for a
little while. When the creative energies return, dive back
in to the writing. With any luck, your readers will be demanding it,
and writing good new books is the best way to develop a body of work
that may also earn you an income.
Good luck!
