I have a book, a real book...
The proof copy of the print edition of "Ventriloquism: Art, Craft, Profession" arrived yesterday. This is my first hands-on experience with a POD (Publish on Demand) book. From Createspace.
The first thing I noticed was that I could have used a smaller font. 12pt is okay, but 11pt would have delivered as readable a book with fewer pages.
The next thing was that many of the old pictures don't print very well in the digital POD format. They're okay, given what they are, though. For the Kindle edition I made many of them larger and tweaked the brightness/contrast setting to make them readable on the smaller, monochrome Kindle. I could have done that with the print edition, too.
Then, the publishing model does not use "signatures," which is a 32-page bundle of 8 folded sheets. It's an advantage because you don't have that cluseer of blank pages at the end to make the page count evenly divisible by 32.
I found only one major typo. The heading for Chapter 1 doesn't say "Chapter 1." like all the other chapters. That bugs me.
I look at it and see things I'd do differently. And I can do that if I want to re-layout the pages and submit for another proof copy. I didn't want to do that. But it kept me awake last night. I'm too much of a perfectionist. I'll decide in the next couple of days.
Guess what? Even though the proof copy cost me the same as a production run copy will cost, they printed PROOF in big letters on the last page. I guess they didn't want me to sell the proof copy. Go figure.
The first thing I noticed was that I could have used a smaller font. 12pt is okay, but 11pt would have delivered as readable a book with fewer pages.
The next thing was that many of the old pictures don't print very well in the digital POD format. They're okay, given what they are, though. For the Kindle edition I made many of them larger and tweaked the brightness/contrast setting to make them readable on the smaller, monochrome Kindle. I could have done that with the print edition, too.
Then, the publishing model does not use "signatures," which is a 32-page bundle of 8 folded sheets. It's an advantage because you don't have that cluseer of blank pages at the end to make the page count evenly divisible by 32.
I found only one major typo. The heading for Chapter 1 doesn't say "Chapter 1." like all the other chapters. That bugs me.
I look at it and see things I'd do differently. And I can do that if I want to re-layout the pages and submit for another proof copy. I didn't want to do that. But it kept me awake last night. I'm too much of a perfectionist. I'll decide in the next couple of days.
Guess what? Even though the proof copy cost me the same as a production run copy will cost, they printed PROOF in big letters on the last page. I guess they didn't want me to sell the proof copy. Go figure.
posted by Al Stevens | 8:06 AM
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