Producing A Literary Work Literary Article |
It is not anything like what it once was except for small press outfits, though even those have succumbed to the digital revolution. The big houses are dinosaurs, waiting to discover they are dead because the public cannot tolerate the crap and drivel they live on for much longer. There are still wealthy or notorious people I will not abuse the word by calling them authors waiting for their agents to negotiate deals for their ghost-written nonsense keyed to the last surviving market, teenagers. Some hangers-on houses refuse to lie down and roll over, and manage to produce moderately noteworthy volumes of inconsequential value, but there no longer is an industry to support them. Publishers no longer invest in talent, nor do any but the wealthiest engage in market advertising. What is left are POD and e-book establishments. Some are afraid to be identified with Print-On-Demand because of the stigma attached, caused by those houses that accept anything so long as they are paid their fee, but do not offer editing. Due to this business-driven philosophy, hundreds of thousands of books get printed with millions of errors, butchering the language worse than slaughter houses. Essentially, most of these enterprises align with Lightning Press, a subsidiary of Ingram Book Distributing Company, because they produce at least a thousand books a week and few others can compete. None of these houses care one jot about the literacy of what they produce, only the money paid up front for them to do it. Since I edit the works of a literary group and attempt to publish the best stories and poems available in anthologies, it became necessary to see if I could find a house that did not charge an up-front fee, mostly because we are non-profit. Of course, the costs of purchasing an ISBN, a bar code, and a guaranteed slot in a large bookseller like Amazon is unavoidable, but can be achieved via donations and moderate sales. So how does one go about readying a manuscript for such a beast? Lulu is the only reliable company I could find. They make their profit via the print house and take a tiny percentage on each book sold by the author. They offer a website to display their author's books, but charge for them to be displayed at the online booksellers. I arrange for cover illustrations in advance. Good artists are very hard to come by and often expensive. We luck out because some members of our group are exceptionally creative illustrators. For our literary group, we generally vote on things and have a communal effort to insure that what we do is eminently fair and impartial. (Are you listening, Judge Scalia?) We form committees to judge the contest material and select the best stories. I find members willing to edit them, if available, and await the returns. Most of these people have full-time jobs and cannot participate without my giving them months to perform the work. The stories come in and I examine them once to make certain nothing has been overlooked. I cannot expect these young editors to spot things like punctuation of one font and text of another. Those inadvertent errors truly hang up a document at the printer. Sometimes an uncommon name or word is misspelled. Another thing I look for is that the stories end properly, that is, a single line of text or just a few words, or even one word, is not relegated an entire page of its own. To accomplish that, I have to scour the story and find ways to consolidate the meaning of any lines not requiring excess words. The next phase is also critical. Although Lulu says it accepts all kinds of wordprocessors, my submissions were entirely unrecognizable in their final Adobe PDF file that they use to send to the printer. I tried both Word and Word Perfect, but their process did not work well with either. So I decided to create my own PDF files. I lucked out getting Adobe Acrobat 6.0, the generator to create Portable Document Format files, at an E-Bay auction. Learning its idiosyncrasies took a month, but was well worth it. Most of my authors submit their material to me in Word. My version of it used to cooperate well with PDF, but developed a glitch, forcing me to convert everything to Word Perfect instead. The glitch happened because of a virus that corrupted my old Millennium OS. My hard drive also corrupted, so I had to start again with a better drive and Windows 2000. My copy of Word had been downloaded and it was gone. The copy I obtained does not cooperate with Adobe at all. I did not mind that because I dislike most features of Word, especially the insertion of headers which I find nearly impossible to master. Word Perfect 11 has a special feature by which I can publish a document directly to PDF. It works very well with small files up to 100,000 words.. The front matter of a book is the next thing to organize after the editing of individual material is complete. This consists of Title page, Copyright page, Acknowledgments, Dedication, Table of Contents or TOC, and sometimes a preface or forward. All of it must be converted for a 6 x 9 inch page size. Microsoft allows you to create such a page size in Page Setup and alter the margins. I use half inch. The page numbering is usually small Roman numerals at bottom center. Font sizes vary considerably. The actual page numbers usually have to wait until all the stories are entered with headers, then collated. Also, I like to use what are called dot leaders after each story title to lead into each page number in the TOC. I begin with the first story, making sure the page with the title is not numbered. I convert the story to 6 x 9. Titles look best when bolded with a larger font than the text, which is mostly 12 point Arial or Times New Roman. I prefer 18 point font for titles and 14 for underlying names. I then do a drop cap on the first letter of the first word of each story. These can vary. I set mine to the width of 3 lines of text. Next comes the page numbering. Beginning with page 2, I set the Word Perfect engine to reproduce the numbers on alternating sides for odd and even pages. Page 1 is always odd, being on the right. The number font should match that of the text, but it does not have to do so. There are also several choices on how the numbers can be displayed, such as adding dashes on the sides or using parentheses. I keep mine plain and simple. Headers come next. Again, I generally choosing alternating odd and even; odd for the titles; even for the name of the book. With headers, you also have to delineate the font and be careful not to create additional line spaces. It is now a question of where to place the first story. Since we want page 1 to be on the right, one must make sure there are the correct blank pages after the front matter to see that it is so. That procedure is followed for every story until all are connected in a single manuscript. I tend to shoot for 30 to 40 stories so that 200 pages of text can be produced. Sometimes, tales are very short and more can be allowed. Another gauge is 90,000 words. The industry considers anything less than 75,000 to be inadequate for a novel and more than 120,000 too large. That set, I go back to the TOC, extend all the dot leaders and insert the correct page numbers. There may be some end matter, such as advertisements, authors to plug or their published works. Sometimes it is advisable to place contributing author short biographies at the end, rather than in small text size before each story. Black and white photos can also be reproduced. All of that depends on the nature of the work. That done, the next step involves creating the PDF file. When that is finished, you submit it to the publisher electronically, where it invariably tells you about some fonts you neglected to embed in your Acrobat Distiller before making the PDF. In my case, Word Perfect has trouble converting a 200 page document to PDF, so I developed another way to accomplish the feat. I make each story into a PDF file and combine them one-by-one in Acrobat. They have a tool just for doing that, also one to fix headers and page numbers when they go awry as is sometimes the case. I make absolutely certain the needed fonts are properly embedded before doing any of this and surround my desk with incense, recorded chants, and good luck charms. (The Bush Being Guillotined is my favorite.) I have been known to sacrifice my children and ex-wives to insure success. Fine. Sometimes the process is smooth and we move to the next step, sometimes not, getting the same message about embedding. That's when I write a furiously, nasty and insulting email and get them to do something about it. The next part is all about uploading the covers. They have to be exact, precisely 300 dots per inch (dpi) in RPG format and the number of pixels they want, or their whole network catches on fire. After that, the binding color and text is inserted according to the choices available. Cover and page thickness are a given, as is cover lamination, but the binding type is selectable. I always choose Perfect Bound, glued and stitched. That is basically it. In the old days, the starving author brought the manuscript to the publisher who invariably sneered and flung it in the slush pile. No longer. We can achieve mediocrity much more efficiently. I then select a price, enabling Lulu to pay the printer for each copy sold, and send us a small royalty. I order a proof, wait two weeks for it to be sent via UPS Ground, look for errors, often discover multitudes, fix them, and resubmit. This time, I pay for an ISBN, bar code and Amazon, Borders and Barnes and Noble distribution via Ingram. Each of these online booksellers require cover illustrations and book descriptions sent to them independently, not necessarily by the publisher. Covers to Amazon, for example, must conform to specific guidelines, such as 72 dpi without borders and be submitted through FTP after they send one a user name and password. The ISBN is 10 digits without dashes. Any description accompanying a book must be submitted by an amazon form. The same is basically true for the other booksellers. As you can see, nothing is simple anymore. W. A. Rieser |
