ROBUST discussion

Well, I've done it. The last step in anything publishing, I produced my own Hardcover. (Casewrap, not a dust-jacket type.)

Here's the cover and what it looks like, which will be followed up with a link soon enough.



Click on the cover to see it bigger, if you like.

Now for the link to the Lulu page. Yeah, I had to use Lulu as Createspace doesn't do hardcover.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/daniel-a-rob...

Some things to note about this experience, besides the insane price. Well, I think it's insane, but I did get a discount going on it.

I did the cover myself, front and back. I did the interior files, all by myself. In fact, I didn't pay Lulu one penny for anty assistance on its creation.

Their distribution model, much like createspace, is a little more pricey. If I do upgrade to it, that won't happen until the end of Q2 of 2013 as it's $75 and I need to save it up.

Casrwrap, a whopping 701 pages, all three novels of the Valinthia series are under one hard cover. If somebody is going to pay that price, I think they should get their money's worth.

OH, one more thing. I got the preview on it to go for 37 pages. Right under the cover, the preview button is there. Click it. Wait 30 seconds for it to load the cover. Page 5 is blank on purpose, so the first page of the first chapter starts on the right hand side. When you get to 37, the back cover is visible. The interior pages may seem a little fancy, and for that price, I figured it was a groovy thing.

If I overdid the fancy on the interior for chapter starts, I'm sure Andre will tell me about it. I look forward to those moments. ^_^

The little preview button doesn't do the cover much justice, but in person, the thing sizzles with vibrant colors.

Two lessons I learned here.

One, I've gotten better a little, I think, on making my own covers.

Two, it's a buttload of work.

Since I produced a half dozen paperbacks and a single hardcover on my own, I think I'm going to take a little break. No more paperbacks or hardcover books.

Just ebooks for now. That's it. I've done what I set out to do, publishing wise. If I ever do another paperback or hardcover, it's because I wrote a best seller sometime in the future and the fans are asking after one. Only then.

If you have an opinion on anything I've done here, please share, both good and bad, please. I know the price will be a zinger, and I underpriced it by a bunch from their suggested retail price. In fact, it's pretty close to the minimum listing I could get for it.

Thanks for taking a peek.

Rest well, and good evening.

Love your drop caps, Daniel, and the chapter heads too.

Andre Jute wrote: "Love your drop caps, Daniel, and the chapter heads too."

Thank you, Andre. Coming from you, that means quite a bit. ^_^

Nice cover - a little hard to see the title against the planet. What does it look like with a black shadow?

Drop caps? I'm so jealous!

I'm jealous too! Great job on the interior, Daniel. One of the reasons I have not pubbed to paper is I'm holding out for a real quality interior design. Normally a fairly practical person, I have an artistic bent that is not satisfied by the limitations of Createspace. It must please my senses. Yeah, it will be a true vanity book...

The title above looked as if it were in white, but upon having a larger look from the preview, I see it is silver. Is the lettering raised, by any chance, it pops very nicely.

Nicely done, Daniel!

I do trade paperback for my novels through Lightning Source, so it's nice to know I'm not the only writer/author/publisher spending time tackling this medium. I am contemplating hardcover as well, but I'm trying to finish novel #4, but, maybe, some time later this year.

I've included the link to my trade paperbacks at Amazon so you can see what I do for print. Just click the Look Inside cover and look at the first pages. Here: http://www.amazon.com/When-See-You-Ka...

Great minds think alike...yada yada. Love the drop caps in yours. Beautiful!

Again, congratulations! It's a lot of work, but I do believe there are readers out there who appreciate these artistic efforts.

Best,
Katherine Owen

Drop caps are a bit of a bother to arrange but they're so beautiful, I went to the trouble for IDITAROD. You can "look inside" at http://www.amazon.com/IDITAROD-novel-...

K.A. - I played with a dark shadow with it, but obscuring the planet and the multi-colored stars didn't let the colors contrast well. However, it looks like it will blend off some on the smaller previews, but at full size on the actual cover, the silvery letters are thick enough to translate to the eye nicely. 3D letter is harder to discern on a 2d image. Thank you for the compliment. :)

Sharon - I use LibreOffice for my interior design, and pretty much however you can make it look on the page, all you have to do is hit the PDF button on the toolbar, and it properly embeds all the required fonts and styles. Once you have the PDF file with the embedded stuff, CreateSpace can print it. I know exactly how you feel when it comes to how it looks. ^_^

Katherine - Your example for your paperbacks are absolutely beautiful. Well done doesn't quite say enough. :)

Thank you everyone for the kind words. It's appreciated. :)

Thanks for the heads-up, Daniel. My biggest problem with CreateSpace is that for paperback, all covers are glossy. I can't see that cutting it for my book (which of course anyway resides in the slush pile - way down at the bottom at the moment). I'm looking for matte.

Katherine, your interior looks perfect for your book, and it looks professional. Were you able to work with LS on the design?

Sharon wrote: "Thanks for the heads-up, Daniel. My biggest problem with CreateSpace is that for paperback, all covers are glossy. I can't see that cutting it for my book (which of course anyway resides in the slu..."

Sharon,

FYI - Lightning Source offers the matte finish. I use it and love it for my covers. LSI is not an easy undertaking. You have to submit a finished PDF file for both book cover and interior and live with how it looks or pay for changes. It's a bit of trial and error, but I am pleased with their finished product. I charge $15.99 USD for my books. I don't sell a ton, but readers buying them never complain about the price.

Thanks to you both ~Daniel and Sharon ~ for taking a look and the compliments. I'm glad you like the print versions.

I did all the interior work with Adobe InDesign and using fonts I bought from MyFonts.com. It's not all from my imagination, I was inspired by Alice Hoffman's novel, The Ice Queen, and went from there. It IS NOT an easy undertaking, but I'm glad I did it. I try to follow the same pattern/template for every print version, so it's not as much work with a new novel project.

KO

Once you've set up the grid and made the paragraph and display styles for one book, it gets easier to format a second book in the same style. But it's still a time-consuing activity even after you've mastered the software (QuarkXPress or InDesign), which come with some of the steepest learning curves in computers, in part because graphic design stands at the junction of several tricky trades and crafts. Even the generic descriptor for this clump of skills and trades and professions and knowledgebases is weird and wonderful: reprographics.

Even the generic descriptor for this clump of skills and trades and professions and knowledgebases is weird and wonderful: reprographics.

That quite a word.

It is a great word, and weird and wonderful describes nicely how I feel about such an undertaking. I shall have to budget for someone else to design my interior when the time comes that I am ready to go to print (which I'm thinking is about when I'm ready to publish the next book).

Thanks for all the information, everyone, I've tucked it away...

Here's an important update, friends. It's not a good one. It looks like I'll be taking a gander at Lightning Source. The reason is found here, in my blog post:

http://magicvsscience.wordpress.com/2...

It's a shame, too. The cover and interior pages looked very nice, but I just can't justify poor standards of production in other areas.

That's too bad, Daniel. Keep us posted on Lightning Source.

I'm sorry to hear that, Daniel, but the truth is that it was predictable.

More years ago than would be polite to ask me about, I arrived in the office of the production manager of my ad agency; I would work for this printer who had served a seven-year apprenticeship for six months as part of my training. The first thing he said to me was, "I don't care how many doctorates you have, you can't do this right if you think you know anything." I was, of course, a star pupil; he turned me into a world authority on reprographics. The thing you have to understand about printing before you start is that most of it is counterintuitive. It doesn't work like you expect. And there is so much of it to learn, with tiny counterintuitive details that can trip you up along the way, that people who come into the trade as a money-making scheme as Lulu did, and because they think they know about computers -- from which, in their minds it follows that they know about graphic design (fail!) and thus about printing (humongous fail!) --, simply won't ever make a good book.

There's a reason CoolMain Press, with two designers like Mick and me on board, and money for whatever I say is necessary, doesn't do books as ambitious as yours. It isn't even that we can't guarantee earning the expense back, though that would be a consideration if so many others didn't already mitigate against the scheme. The reason is that we're convinced that with the mechanisms available to us, like Lulu, the project would be a nasty foulup and a waste of our time.

Frankly, even with a guarantee that my project would be supported and serviced by people who know what they're doing, I still wouldn't make a big hardcover book, or even a small one. I can understand why you want one, but I would find it hard to justify the cost and the heartburn.

We stop at paperbacks through Createspace because that is where we have maximum control, and can bring our skills to bear without superhuman expenditure of time and effort.

It can't have failed to strike you that for the quality delivered, Createspace is supremely cheap.

I hear you loud and clear, Andre. I can and do see the predictability in the scheme of things, as you describe them. My disappointment in Lulu isn't so much a thing of pride, but a thing of professionalism. I like to give every company, new or old, the benefit of a doubt.

I've known start-up companies with a superior product, excellent quality and top notch service completely fail because they were new to the business. Unknown quantities that chugged some of the best product their line could produce, come to a screeching halt because somebody, somewhere, didn't give them a chance.

I myself have been denied jobs I was capable of doing because I didn't have ten years or more of experience. Which is an oxymoron in so many weird ways, because if nobody hires people with little to no experience and take the risk, how will anyone even get the experience that's so sought?

I'm not justifying the cause, bro, just laying down the elements that plague my thoughts. Lulu produces physical books. I gave them their shot and they blew it. All things considered, tomorrow they may produce triple A quality books from here on out, but I won't let them do it on my dime anymore.

My want of a hardcover novel, again, isn't based so much on pride, but on professionalism. I have a checklist of things I wish to accomplish before my time on Earth is done. For those things I pursue, I won't do a half-arsed job. It will be a quality product, and it will be an enjoyable read for those interested in that genre. Or else. *Lightning Flash Here*

I've been a one-man-show for a little more than a decade now. The day I couldn't pass a pre-employment physical in April of 2001, I knew that being part of a team that owned a like-minded goal was probably never going to happen again. Instead of being recruited, I needed to recruit others to reach my goals.

When I turned my eyes on self publishing in 2009, my personal experience was decorated with three major careers, add to that acting and singing, and add to that a penchant for martial arts and politics, interconnected with my respect for women and just about nothing else, I owned not a single thing that told me how to bring the written word before readers in such a manner that they would enjoy the story as presented. That was a skill I developed on my own, and am still developing to this day.

Among everything I've done in my life, this is the only thing that's going to survive me. All of us. Your writing, my writing, the work of the author down the street who nobody even knows yet... what we publish is the beginning of our immortality. Our ideas and created worlds will outlast us for centuries, if not longer. So I ask my reflection in the mirror... how could I not serve my writing as well as it will eventually serve me?

100 years from now, nobody will care if I paid my electric bill on time or not. The lack of interest surrounding my need for grape juice or medication will be understood as well. A century means many things. Go to a grave yard. View the deceased. Read the years. Are their needs met? Bills paid? Items accounted for? It ends there, all of it, at the tombstone. For quite a few writers, it can actually begin with their death. Like it did for Edgar Poe.

CreateSpace served the physical paperback needs handsomely, for reasons you already know. I agree with you more often than not, my friend. Supremely cheap they are, and well done on top of it. Because of them, my check list received many finished marks. I only have one left. The heartburn in my gullet reminds me I'm still alive, and the expense is a creature I personally build up just to slay with my bare hands. It's the penalty of the one-man-show, one I have little choice but to accept.

I love what you and the others do for CoolMain Press, and seriously applaud your success. Any group of like-minded individuals who share the same goal will always achieve their desires, and good sir, I'm envious of those who have taken up residence under your umbrella of experience. Apologies for rambling on like this, you spent important time sharing your wisdom, and such a thing isn't lost to the wind, I can assure you.

For most people, time is money. For me, it has a much different definition, with too many side effects. In this world we live in, it can change us, or we can change it. I'm not working on doing either one anymore, because I'm using what I have left to create worlds. May the good times outweigh the bad, brother, in both of our backyards. ^_^

(This novella is brought to you by too much sugar in Dan's Vanilla Chai Tea.)

If your heart is set on it, may your dream be realized.

Daniel wrote: "...I have a checklist of things I wish to accomplish before my time on Earth is done. For those things I pursue, I won't do a half-arsed job..."

What Andre said...