Vanity Publishing . . . ?? (1 Viewer)

[Paul Higson]

Planning to start a project this winter - something to do with birds/birding on Orkney, haven't quite decided exactly what this may encompass yet.

Anyway, it will include charts, graphs, maps etc etc.

Would welcome any suggestions for software/tools etc etc to use - the easier and cheaper the better.

Have Microsoft Publisher - would this be sufficient ??

Also, when finished, how do I make it readily available to any interested parties ??

 

[Mark Lew1s]

Surely there are enough of you up there to put together a proper county avifauna? ;-)

 

[West End Birder]

Hi Paul, you will need to obtain an ISBN (I think you have no choice but to buy 10, was £70 when I self published a book back in 2002) and barcoding is vital (places print those) - a QR code is a good addition now too.

From memory it is easy to upload to Amazon (and they did not charge me anything) then you need to send lots of copies out for review etc. Most orders will come through (sorry forgotten the name), Gardiners I think - when people buy it off Amazon. I printed 250, gave away 10% for reviews and sold all the rest. Enjoy watching it appear on e-bay for £500+

Of course you could just do it online which is much less hassle.

The other option is to find a publisher but that has an enormous downside - firstly you get about 10% of what they sell to the wholesalers for (so not the cover price - around 65p for my latest literary masterpiece) and also they will potentially severely murder your baby.

I am currently researching for a book which I hope to publish on 3rd May 2021 (my 62nd birthday) and I will definitely be doing it myself this time!

Finally, you will make no money out of it whatsoever, but it is a lot of fun, or at least I found it a lot of fun writing, but proof reading is really depressing - make sure you are not the only person to proof read it, and try to get people you don't know to read it, friend and relatives will always say it is good. I got some complete strangers to read mine which was very useful (and kind of them).

Hope that helps

Rob

 

[West End Birder]

Thinking about this the barcode was only for Waterstones although I think these days it would be assumed the book would have one.

Might be better not to print the price on the back, you can then do dynamic pricing!

 

[JTweedie]

Are you thinking of physically publishing it or online? If the latter, WordPress might be a good option.

 

[Telephoto Paul]

If you need maps, the open source mapping project OpenStreetMap has come on a massive way in the ten years since it was started. Not quite as pretty as a nice OS map, but otherwise high quality. And free.

 

[stuartvine]

Publisher would be fine for most purposes, then why not simply save it as a pdf and make it available via a weblink. If you have One Drive (most Microsoft users do) upload it, click on the document, open share, click "get a link", make it public, copy the link and publish the link in appropriate forums.

 

[saluki]

Planning to start a project this winter - something to do with birds/birding on Orkney, haven't quite decided exactly what this may encompass yet.

Anyway, it will include charts, graphs, maps etc etc.

Would welcome any suggestions for software/tools etc etc to use - the easier and cheaper the better.

Have Microsoft Publisher - would this be sufficient ??

Also, when finished, how do I make it readily available to any interested parties ??

If you're familiar with Publisher then that might be the best option but personally, I wouldn't use it. I often get artwork sent to me as Publisher files, don't find it easy to work with at all. If you want to use professional software, depending on how old your operating system is, you can get a legit copy of old Adobe InDesign CS2 from here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html

This tells you how to install on Windows 8:

http://blog.rainwebs.net/2013/01/27/adobe-cs-2-on-windows-8/

I have this running on an old Vista operating sytem at home so I know it runs on that.

Another alternative is to beg, borrow, buy or steal a version of CorelDraw (this is bundled with PhotoPaint, Corel's version of Photoshop - an excellent program in itself). This should manage small books no problem. Older versions should be obtainable at a reasonable price, or you could download a free trial version of the latest release to see how you get on with it:

http://www.coreldraw.com/gb/free-trials/

A completely free alternative is Scribus:

http://www.scribus.net/

I've never used this so I can't comment on it's usefulness, seems to get decent reviews however.

If you're doing the whole thing yourself you need to know a few things (ie. keeping all your images to 300dpi), do a search on 'desktop publishing'. Or maybe call in at a printers/ graphic design company and ask for advice - they'd have to be very mean spirited not to help.

 

[Paul Higson]

Many thanks to all for replies/advice etc - extremely helpful.

Think I will sit down and work out what I want to do, how best to do it, then take it from there.

 

[West End Birder]

Make sure you pour a glass of wine first then!

 

[Telephoto Paul]

Another option is to forgo any sort of WYSIWYG program and teach yourself LaTeX. It's a change of mind-set, but if you're producing a large, textbook style document it does have benefits around producing a consistent output.

 

[David Ferguson]

I designed and created 'The Birds of Buckinghamshire' which is a 400 page hardback. It is a mixture of text, photos, graphs and maps. The final printer ready file was a pdf which had been created from a Wordperfect file. This file consisted of text embedded with 300dpi images. These images came from 3 sources: photos from Serif Photoplus (although any photo editing software will do), graphs from Corel Quattro, which is the spreadsheet module of Corel Office, and maps via Dmap (www.dmap.co.uk). The design was kept fairly simple so no dtp software was needed.

 

[Swindon Addick]

I'm a bit late on this, but thought I'd pass on a tip - if you're worried about distributing the end product, or about being stuck with more copes than you can realistically sell, it's worth considering a print-on-demand publisher. It's not the cheapest way to print, but it takes the risk out as you can order multiple small batches or even leave the publisher to sell online for you. I know about lulu.com, which is fairly well-known and offers services in the UK, but there are others. I can't tell you anything useful about how easy they are to work with, as I've only ever bought from them not published.