Self-publishing Archives - Page 2 of 2

December Already?!–CoronaLife Day 628

December 2, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

How is it December already? As often happens with me, October dragged, and November flew.

I have had a rather productive week. Since I am expecting the proofread of my genealogy book back soon, I put my shoulder to the wheel to get everything else I needed finished.

I completed all the title pages. I had already had the chapter tree charts done. And today I finished up the photo pages I will be including in the book.

I ended up with 26 pages of photos. Hopefully I will not need to cull them for page count.

Aside from any fixes I need to make from the proofread, the only other thing will be the cover. I can’t do that until I begin the publishing process, when I will be given a cover template to fit the page count. I know what I want to do for the cover, so once I have the template it should go quickly.

So here we are on the other side of Thanksgiving, with the end of the year barreling toward us. I have other projects I need to wrap up in the next couple of weeks, so I will be busy as an elf for a while.

I hope all of you had a warm and safe Thanksgiving. I enjoyed getting together with family once again.

What end-of-year projects are you working on?

Entitlement—CoronaLife Day 586

October 21, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I have finally gotten around to working on the title pages for my mom’s genealogy book.

Working with the image I chose to use for my title pages proved a little more difficult than I had anticipated due to my own software limitations, but I figured it out and am now proceeding happily.

I had decided to use a basic outline map of the British Isles as my title page backdrops.* My mom’s lineages come mainly from Ireland and Scotland, so I divided the book into sections. The Country Title page has the appropriate country as the backdrop.

Then, with each section, I have the surname chapters. The appropriate county is still the backdrop, but in gray, with color highlighting where the family came from in that country.

I figured since I am paying for a full-color book, I should make the most of it! Using this scheme is a great way to have the reader oriented without having to use a separate map page. Since many readers may not know where these places are, and are not familiar with the geography, I had wanted a way to provide this info.

Hopefully the title pages look nice as well as being informative.

*Thanks to Base map © maproom.net

Photo Finish—CoronaLife Day 565

September 30, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I am continuing the progress on my mom’s genealogy book. I have completed all the photos pages with the pictures I have.

We are tracking down which of my aunt’s six kids has the “old” photo album with the intergenerational pictures in it. Once we locate it, I will borrow it and scan some of the relatives I am missing from there and add them.

That book hopefully will solve a mystery for us. We have a photo of my grandfather with his siblings. We know who they all are, but the two oldest girls were only a year apart, and we don’t know which is which. We have no other pictures of Caroline, but we think there is a photo of Annie in the album. If so, we should be able to determine which is which, as they look very different.

So what remains? The chapter title pages. I think the first one will be the hardest, as I figure out how to work with the multi-layered image I am using. Once I figure it out, the rest should be able to be tweaked easily. I also have the cover to do, but I can’t really do that until I know how many pages the book will be and get the template from the printer.

I have secured proofreaders for my book’s text, so that is set up. Hopefully by the end of November I will have all the parts together and I can do the final formatting and cover.

With luck, I can have it ready for order by Christmas. However, I know there are supply chain issues in publishing right now, so it may take a little longer. But my goal was to have it ready to order by the end of the year, so I’m hopefully on track for that.

I am moving forward on my project. How about you?

It’s All in the Details—CoronaLife Day 418

May 6, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I’m doing my family research, and I’m waiting on 2 more books before it is complete. One I have asked the library to get, but they have not had luck finding it. Which is strange because they are who I got it from the first time! The other book I will likely have to buy.

While I am waiting for those books, I can get started on the work of putting my family book together. It is pretty much written, but it’s a far cry from done. I need to go through and do a lot of cleaning up—making sure the chapter headings and subheadings are all the same font and size, that the children lists are all the same format, re-learn how to do the indexes, and make sure the family trees are complete and up to date with the latest research.

The biggest issue will be reading through and correcting the verb tense. It seems natural sometimes to write about these ancestors in present tense, but really the book should be in past tense. This all happened long ago, after all. Right now the book’s tense is all over the place, and it will take a good deal of concentration to make sure I catch all the tense changes needed.

Once I get all of that done, it will be time to lay out the book design and do the cover. So many details to deal with when you self-publish a book! I have done it once before, though, so I know what is coming. A lot of meticulous work—but it will be worth it in the end.

So that’s what’s on my plate for the next few months, writing-wise.

On a side note, my hands are feeling much better, about 95%. And I get my second COVID shot today. Here’s hoping the side effects don’t knock me out too badly.

What’s on your schedule these days?

How Many Rejections Is Enough to Give Up on a Story?

February 1, 2018 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

While many writers are choosing to go the self-publishing route in order to reap the many benefits of that path, I’m still pursuing the traditional route of trying to get an agent. Thus the newest round of queries I blogged about last week. While I am having decent response, I am also seeing rejections, and I got to wondering: is there a certain number of rejections where you should get the hint and stop querying?

Because I can’t help thinking much farther ahead than I need to (thank you, anxiety disorder), I do wonder what to do if this round of queries doesn’t land me an agent. If no agent bites, that will be over 100 rejections. In the past, that many rejections would probably signal an end to that manuscript’s life, but these days it opens up a new dilemma: Do I put the manuscript in a drawer, or move onto self-publishing?

I hate to put The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone in the drawer. It has had a long and unique gestation, so the manuscript is special to me. In addition, I truly believe in this story. Beta readers, both teachers and middle grade students, loved it, and I feel in my bones that Pharaoh’s Stone has the potential to go far.

But do I really want to carry the weight of doing everything myself? That’s the trade off. Although the marketing largely falls to the author no matter which route you take, the initial editing, book design, cover design, and all the formatting is taken care of with traditional publishing. That’s a huge investment in time and money, as well as a steep learning curve.

The good news is that I have 2 coauthors on Pharaoh’s Stone, so this is not a decision I need to make alone. The other good news is that we have a long way to go before we need to have this discussion. We still have 48 agents to hear back from.

If you go the traditional route, at what point do you “give up” on a manuscript finding a home? Is there a magic rejection number?

Because it All Reflects on Me

June 26, 2014 By Kerry Gans 4 Comments

Publishing is a business and everything I put out reflects on my brand. Everything. Even if it’s something outside my usual commercial writing sphere that few people will ever see.

Most of you know I successfully self-published a genealogy book for my dad’s family. It came out wonderfully, and I was very pleased. I decided to edit the book down to end with my grandparents’ generation (to keep personal information on living individuals private) and release it to the public.

I chose to get the book professionally copy edited, because no author can catch all his or her own mistakes. I did not hire a professional book designer only because I could not afford one. However, I did research the basic design mistakes of self-published authors that make their books look amateur and did my best to avoid them.

My genealogy book is clearly a niche book. I will be shocked if it sells even 100 copies. Because of the small expected sales, and because genealogy books even by the genealogy publishers are not exactly known for their book design, I felt that the business decision of not paying for professional design was a valid one. Had this been a book I anticipated having high sales numbers, I would have thought otherwise. However, knowing the expectations of my audience, I made a calculated decision.

Because, as a business, I have to decide how to spend (or not spend) my limited money.

Time is also money, as the saying goes, and as a business owner, I need to make another decision: How much time am I willing to invest in any given project to make it “good enough.”

After I got my copy-edited genealogy Word manuscript back, I made the changes, went through it one more time, then converted it into a PDF file. I added in all the photo JPGs, checked everything one more time, and then went through the final step of converting that regular PDF into a PDF/X-1a file, which is the required file format for Ingram Spark (and CreateSpace). I had done this exact process for my family’s edition, and it had worked flawlessly.

Then I uploaded the PDF/X file and waited for the e-proofs from Ingram Spark. I got them, and flipped through the proofs quickly to make sure all the margins and layout looked nice. It did, so I Approved the paperback version and ordered a hardback version for myself so I could see the cover prior to Approving it. I got the hardcover (beautiful!!) and happily pressed Approve. My genealogy book was now available to the public.

But.

A few days later, I was at my cousin’s house, and I pulled out the hardback to answer a genealogy question. And I saw something strange in the text. A weird space in a word. Instead of Census, it said C ensus. I flipped a page—d aughters. And another. And another. Odd spaces in random words littered the book.

At home, I pulled up the final PDF/X file. Yup, there were the weird spaces. I pulled up the regular PDF file, the one I had converted from. No weird spaces. I tried the conversion again. The spaces appeared again. To this day I have no idea why they appeared in this conversion, when they did NOT appear in the family edition version. It is a technical mystery that is baffling me. But I had to find some way to fix it, because I could not let the book stay out in public the way it was.

So I went into the PDF/X file and painstakingly found every instance I could of the spacing. I went through the document twice, and used the Text Touch-Up tool to fix it. It took hours over the space of several days. But I finally had a version with no weird spaces. I uploaded the new files—even though I knew it would cost $25 per version to change the interior after I had Approved it.

The second set of e-proofs came in and I vowed to go through the text this time, not just flip through. And I found more space issues. They were more apparent in the e-proof because the font was slightly thinner, enlarging the space between letters. I checked the file I had uploaded. Yup, there they were—not as glaring as the ones I had fixed, but noticeable now that I was attuned to them.

So I fixed the PDF/X again. More (but fewer) hours. Another upload (but this time no fee because I was still in the Approval process).

Third set of e-proofs. I combed through the proof and all was looking good—until page 167. I found a space I missed. And another space on page 304. And another on page 338. But that’s all. Just three spaces.

Did I go in and fix them again?

Yes, I did. (You knew I would, right?) And I also found another space I had missed, and a misspelled name that had escaped both the copyeditor and me. And then I uploaded PDF/X #4.

I am waiting for this set of e-proofs, but I think I have finally gotten to where this result is “good enough.” Nothing can ever be perfect, so there comes a time when you need to let it go. I am at that point (barring some glaring error) with this project. I have spent all the time I want in getting this as close to perfect as I can. No doubt some of you are thinking I have spent far too much time on it, given the small rate of return I expect. But I think my time was worth it. Why?

Because publishing is a business and everything I put out reflects on my brand.

Everything.

So I have to make it good.

What do you think? Am I conscientious or completely obsessive? When do you get to feeling that it’s “good enough”?

CreateSpace vs. Ingram Spark

January 30, 2014 By Kerry Gans 7 Comments

Any of you following along will know I am trying to self-publish a Print-On-Demand (POD) genealogy reference book on my family in particular. I had decided to use Amazon’s CreateSpace because so many people suggested it and it has been around a while. What I found was that because of the length of my book, I could NOT use CreateSpace (more on that below), and so I went over to Lightning Source, another POD company people had suggested. Lightning Source’s POD arm for small or self-publishers is called IngramSpark.

The following comparison of the two resources is necessarily incomplete, as I could not complete the process with CreateSpace and have not yet completed the process with IngramSpark. But it’s what I have found so far.

CreateSpace is very easy to use. However, I found their Submission Guidelines to be missing or misleading in key areas. When reading how to format your book’s interior, it tells you the gutter margin for 3 different pages count ranges, all the way up to 1,000 pages. What they don’t tell you anywhere in the Submission Guidelines (it can be found elsewhere on the website) is that there are maximum page limitations based on trim size and color vs. black and white options. Based on their Page Count table, the maximum number of pages anywhere is 828 (not 1,000) and if you choose to do full color, 480 is your limit. My full-color book, unfortunately, is 508 pages. Due to the nature of the content, there is no way I can cut 30 pages out. Which is why I went to IngramSpark. (I did confirm with CreateSpace customer service that I was correct and I COULD NOT print this book with them.)

IngramSpark is also not difficult to use. However, it will require more money for you to get started. At this point in the process, I have run across several fees:

$49 one-time set-up fee per book (waived if you have a 50 book drop order within a certain amount of time after setting up your book)

$11 annual distribution fee (if you are simply printing for your family and do not want distribution, this fee is waived)

ISBN fee. IngramSpark requires you provide your own ISBN number. You can purchase one for $125, or you can purchase batches of them for less per unit through Bowker. CreateSpace allows you to either use an Amazon ID number (not the same as an ISBN) or to purchase an ISBN through them (I think it was $10) or to provide your own.

So it is more expensive to use IngramSpark. The question you need to ask yourself is: Can I make my book fit CreateSpace’s limitations in a way that will not compromise the book’s quality? In my case, because I have a lot of photos and documents and charts, the answer was “no.”

The actual interior design process is the same–upload a PDF to their website. I will say that IngramSpark’s gutter margins are MUCH smaller than CreateSpace’s, probably due to manufacturing differences, which allows me to have larger photos and charts.

I have not used the cover designer for either system yet, so cannot know how they compare. I also don’t know about the quality of the final product or the tracking and royalty payment facets, since I haven’t finished the book yet.

Having to switch to IngramSpark has set me back, because with the much smaller gutter margins I need to re-size all my photos, graphs, etc. The text, of course, was easy to readjust. Still, I am pleased that I have an outlet to get this book out there in the way I envisioned it, instead of having to present it in a non-optimal way to force it into CreateSpace’s limitations.

I am slowly exploring this self-publishing world, both in ebook and now POD. It’s a fascinating journey! I will bring more info on IngramSpark after I have completed the process and have more to share.

Have you done POD? What has your experience been?

Amazon Kindle and CreatSpace

January 9, 2014 By Kerry Gans 5 Comments

A while ago, I put my first short story, To Light and Guard, up on Smashwords. I did it mostly as a learning experience, and haven’t done much to promote it. I wanted to learn how to format a story to upload, and how all the technology worked. That’s much more easily done with a 3,000 word short than an 80,000 word novel!

To round out my education in the technology realm, I just last week got To Light and Guard for sale on Amazon. The process was much the same as Smashwords, just slightly different formatting rules. So now my story is available on both major self-publishing platforms, and available for all ebook formats, including PDF. (A Kindle-friendly file is also available through Smashwords, but the only way to get it listed on Amazon is to either sell more than $2,000 worth of the book or post it directly, as I did.)

The process on both was relatively painless, as long as you are able to read directions and pay attention to details.

I am now embarking on my first print-on-demand project—a genealogy book through Amazon’s CreateSpace. I am still in the process of learning how to format the book properly, and I am sure much tinkering will be required until I get it looking the way I want.

I probably chose a difficult book to start with, because mine includes photos and other non-text illustrations. This interrupts page numbering and makes things a little more complex. But it’s coming together.

I was slightly disappointed in the limits of size and lack of choice in paper type on CreateSpace—I was hoping for a slightly larger than 8.5 x 11 book, but in the end that size might be a blessing in disguise since all my pages are already 8.5 x 11. As long as I get the margins right, that might actually make it easier. I had also hoped that I could specify that the photo pages be on heavier, glossy paper, and the rest on regular stock, but I so far do not see that as an option.

The book is nearly done the preparation stage, and then I will upload it to CreateSpace and finish the process. I am eager to see it all put together and get an author copy to hold in my hands. This book represents years of research, and I hope to get it into the hands of other researchers who can use my work as a stepping stone for theirs. I know how excited I always was to find that someone else had done meticulous research on my line, and that I did not have to re-invent the wheel. I want to give that same thrill to other researchers!

I’ll let you know how the CreateSpace experiment works out. One thing is for certain—I am learning a lot!

Have you ventured into self-publishing? What has your experience been?

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