In the middle ground of page counts, it’s a case of retail price versus reader expectation, but at the extremes of the range, it’s about the physics of printing. A 3000-word short can’t be bound with a flat spine, as there’s not enough depth of paper to glue the spine onto, and using an effectively flat jacket – as with most weekly magazines – looks cheap and devalues the product. A 200,000-word book can theoretically be bound, but it’ll break its spine the first time you open it.

My point is that the nature of printing has dictated page count. Until now.

eBooks increase in size at a very small rate as word count increases. A quick look at my book on Amazon reveals a file size of 488KB at 105,000 words with a to-spec, 221 KB  cover image and no other graphics. If I’d written 210,000 words, it’d be about 750 KB. A million? Just shy of 3 Meg. Hardly big numbers, given that a song from iTunes comes in about 10 Meg, and we throw album-fulls of those onto iPods without thinking twice.

In terms of distribution cost, there’s nothing stopping a writer producing books of a length far in excess of what is currently considered the norm. But why the hell would you?

eBooks are still subject to limitations within the market, and right now, that’s the price you can expect to charge. Text books and event fiction titles from name brand authors appear to be following the existing pricing curves, but publisher promos and self-publishers do seem to have established a new baseline cost for fiction, namely $0.99, or $2.99 if you think you can sell at that price. The curious twist is that that price point appears to be accepted as the fair rate for a title, regardless of how long that title is. With $0.99 as the minimum you can charge for a Kindle book, you can find quality short stories, novellas and novels at that price. At $2.99, you’d struggle to sell a short, but a novella or novel both fit. Beyond $2.99 is the realm of short story collections and full novels, but without a strong reputation and name recognition, you’d probably struggle to make significant sales at that price.

As a new writer publishing his own work, I’m firmly stuck in the $0.99-to-$2.99 camp, which is fine, as I have some distinguished company amongst my independent peers, but with such a limited scope for earnings on a single book, the equation (more books) > (longer books) makes clear business sense. In researching my next project, I’m looking for enough ideas to fill a book of 150 pages max, as what’s the point of writing it longer, when I could spend the time writing another title, which then has its own shot at that $0.99-$2.99 per unit?

Stories need to run their course, so there will always be long books, but I can’t be the only writer thinking this way, and I honestly believe that books are going to get shorter, on average, as a result. That’s fine with me, as I love shorter stories around the 150-200 page mark, but it may come as an unpleasant surprise to those eBook buyers currently sniffing out bargains.

When I decided to put Make a Move out myself, eBooks were still the next big thing, and print was an obvious choice for me. I don’t regret that choice, and I’ll release a small print run of the next book when it’s done, but it did steer me down a path that undermined what Make a Move was meant to be. It was never supposed to be a novel – it’s six stories – but the cost equations of print forced me to squeeze it into that container, and defused some of its impact, its originality. I compromised.

I’ve never been happy about that, but now eBooks are mainstream, and give me all the flexibility I need to deliver the story as it was intended, which is what I’m working on. The hard part is the pricing, but I’ve got some ideas on how to get the numbers to balance. It’s going to take some more work, and probably some time booked off my day job, but it’ll be worth it as it will free me to create book two the way it should be done. Think of this processes like when Apple released Mac OSX Snow Leopard; a re-architecture step to make what follows even better.

So what else have I been up to? Well, something strange happened about 6 months ago, when I said yes to doing something I had no real idea how to do, namely shooting a video for a local Roller Derby team (YouTube link). I said yes because I was bored and thought it’d be fun, which it was. I learned so much about shooting and editing video, and even more about recording, mixing and mastering music. That was a period of extreme creativity for me, and I loved every second. It was also a lesson in the benefits of just saying “yes” and working out the details later; as long as you can outline what you need to learn in the time available, taking risks is a great way to get fired up.

I’m really happy with the result: the music-video-speed edit, the over-compressed colour palette, the punk-rock-meets-High-School-Musical soundtrack… I think it came out great.

And so did some other people…

I was asked off the back of that to do a studio shoot for a newly formed burlesque troupe (www.burlettes.co.uk) including stills. We had no idea how to light a shoot like that, but we knew we could work it out in time, and we nailed it. We’re still editing the dances together, but the quality of the footage is something the whole team are proud of.

Another derby video shoot came up, and we were happy to do that, as this time it included interviews, so the audio recording/processing gave us another learning opportunity, and it was off the back of that shoot that we were invited to work with some local magic practitioners, shooting a street magic show on a full set of broadcast-quality gear. And this show is targeted for more than YouTube…

So what has this got to do with Make a Move? Well, everything.

I can’t work in a vacuum, creating derivative plots and characters, recycled from all of the other media I’ve consumed. I just don’t see the point. I have to live these adventures, meet these people, breathe in these places, and capture those experiences, all enhanced with a touch of fantasy to elevate the narrative beyond the limits reality can endure.

You might be surprised how much of Make a Move is based on experience…

But I have a mortgage, and a child in nursery, and a day job to support them both, and the opportunities for adventure are harder to find. So when I get a chance to explore this life, and meet new people, and create something cool, I’m going to say “yes”, and fight that nagging thought that I should be writing, knowing that the only way that I’ll write anything worth my readers’ time will be to live it first.

But that doesn’t mean that there’ll be magicians in Make a Move 2, and you might be thinking that a show about magic might be boring (it won’t, not the way we’re going to shoot it) but you have to remember the fact of which I remind myself daily:

This is only the beginning.

• I need to maintain a stock of books for the fulfilment of web and direct sales.
• I need to maintain a separate stock of books for potential retailers, as the last thing I want to happen is for a new retailer to place an order and not be able to satisfy it.
• One goal for the next few weeks is to submit review copies to local publications; I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t think I was going to generate sales off the back of the reviews (thinking positive…) so I have to keep a stock of books for any sales spikes reviews cause.
• I’m going to contact a larger retailer who may require ISBN barcodes printing on the books. A block of ISBNs takes at least two weeks to order, then I need to amend the artwork before resubmitting to the printers. I really want to avoid using ISBNs, but this is potentially a big retailer.

It all comes down to timing – making decisions and taking steps in the right order to make sure new print runs arrive just in time to avoid both running out of stock and having to sit on a new shipment (and invoice) for longer than necessary.

That second part is the main problem I’m facing as try to plan this out; even though the first print run has broken even, I’m not significantly into profit yet, certainly not to the extent that I can fund a second printing from the profits from the first. On paper, I’m in the same position I was when I started: I have to pay for the books up front. The issue this time is I don’t have a large number of pre-orders to satisfy, so I’m ordering the full print run with no guaranteed sales. It’s more risk this time, but I knew this point would come, and I’m committed to seeing it through.

So that’s where I am, and the tasks ahead of me. I know I can work through this transition by focussing on one thing at a time within the framework of the broader plan, and by working efficiently, but that doesn’t solve the other problem I’m facing: I need to start the next book.

I know that by deciding to self-publish, I’d always be fighting to balance the business with the creative process of writing, and I hope that the successes (or failures) of one endeavour will inspire the other, but it could go horribly wrong. I guess that’s why, traditionally, authors have a marketing team working for them while they write. Whether I ever land a book deal or not, it seems those days are over, so my only choice is keep working, keep generating ideas in both areas, and keep having fun.

2010 is going to be a busy year.

The risk in doing your first print run is hard to quantify, as you don’t know how family/friends/acquaintances will respond when they see your finished book; buying in principle is one thing, but laying down a not-inconsequential amount of money is another. The worst case scenario for your print run is you sell zero books and you’re in the hole for a lot of money. The 100-book run of Make a Move cost a lot – closer to a grand than not – and that isn’t the kind of loss I can laugh-off. Okay, so someone is going to buy a copy, but that’s no reassurance. It’s a big risk.

So today, I know that my risk paid off. Every penny I make from hereon in is profit (it’s actually operating capital for the next printing, but it’s not paying off a debt, so it’s all good). It’s a big milestone for me, as I can now focus on the “business” with less fear of failure. The next milestone is going to be selling enough copies to justify that second print run, but I have good ideas – new ideas – on how to do that.

I’ve been out talking to independent booksellers (or trying to) regarding selling my new book, and a friend was doing the same on my behalf further afield. She spoke to one bookshop owner who thought my book was too modern for his clientele, and that it would struggle to sell as it didn’t have a local setting or anything to provide an angle he could push. Fair enough – I’ve learned something there. What he said that set me thinking, though, was that he was very impressed with the finish and design of my book (both the binding and the cover) and that it was refreshing to see an independently produced hardback, as most indie books he saw were in paperback, and were typically of low quality, printed on cheaper paper and with basic or unskilled cover designs. And this is a man who is happy to deal directly with indie publishers/authors; this is not a hostile market.

After my friend had reported back, I was thinking about what I’d learned from the encounter, and that was when I came to my realisation; the perception of my book, in concept, is shaped by the actions of every independent author-publisher out there. Every rushed, unedited, cheap book that someone has tried to sell damages the perceived value of my book with potential readers and retailers. That’s pretty unsettling.

But I’m looking at that situation another way now. I’ve flipped it around. Every one of us, by doing the best job we can to produce a quality product, can reinforce the reputation of indie books as an alternative, rather than a second-rate option. That’s pretty reassuring. With the tools and technology now available to everyone, both in production and communication, the time has never been better for us to work together and create a new market – one where an indie book is judged on the quality of its content rather than its cover.

Basically, I was freaking out and very pissed at myself.

Turns out it wasn’t a typo, and I’ve just been staring at this screen for so long I was seeing things. In my defence, the word “eighth” does look damned freakish if you stare at it long enough (never mind that my spellchecker would have caught it – thinking that was just adding to my sense of failure).

So, now that my heart has stopped hammering, I can reflect on the situation. I know there’s going to be at least one typo in the printed book. There has to be. I’ve seen them in traditionally published books, so I know that even professional teams of proofreaders miss things. The point of this post, and the question I want to ask is, at what point do you say “I’ve done everything I can to ensure I’m shipping a tested, quality product?” How much proofing is too much?

At what point can you let go?

Bear in mind that all of my layout decisions were made with one eye on the cost implications, which is something you’ll understand once you’re self -funding a print run, so if my decisions ever seem conservative, that’s probably why. For example if your margins increase, so will your page count and, hence, your unit cost.

One warning based on my own experience: there’s some difference in page measurement between Word for Mac 2008 and Word for Windows 2003, which caused the text to reflow when I moved the file between versions. I had to use Windows to gain access to Adobe Acrobat, and I ended up having to layout the text again. If possible use the same version of Word from start to finish.

Step One – Page Setup

Setting up the page size in Word is easy: just enter the page dimensions based on the size of paper you’re going to print the book on. Most standard book printing sizes aren’t offered in Word, so you’ll need to set up a custom size. Go to File > Page Setup, and then select Manage Custom Sizes from the Paper Size dropdown. In the Custom Sizes dialog, click the + icon and enter the Width and Height into the Paper Size fields. Double-click on the Untitled entry in the list and name the new size (use the name your printer uses for easy reference). For example, Make a Move is printed on Royal paper size, 156 x 234mm. Click OK, and then click OK again to close the Page Setup dialog.

You don’t need to worry about bleeds on your text. The files are centred and the pages cut equally on all sides, so just enter the exact pages size.

Step Two – Page Margins

This is one of the harder choices to make, as you’ve no way of predicting how the book will behave, in a mechanical sense, once it’s printed: how wide will the reader need to open the book so that the left-most text is visible? How much will the pages curve, obscuring that margin? My printer suggests a minimum of 10mm on all margins, but that doesn’t take the number of pages into account, which can effect the curve as the book is opened. I chose 18mm for the Left, Right and Top margins, and 30mm for the Bottom. I set the Footer to 18mm (which left my page numbers a comfortable distance from the text and the bottom of the page) and set the Header to 0mm as there isn’t any header text.

Step Three – Justification

Select all of your body text and justify it (aligning both left and right margins flush to the edge of the printable area). Your intro pages will probably look best centre-aligned, but the rest should be justified. Just look at any published book for confirmation.

Step Four – Fonts

You may want to mix fonts in your text, either using a different font for intro pages, or maybe to highlight a particular scene in the story. Whatever you decide to do, apply your fonts as they are going to appear in the final book now. Font changes later on can push your text out and leave you needing to layout the book again.

You can use any font you want within certain rules, the most important being that is has to be easy to read. That seems obvious, but try reading a page or two with your chosen font to make sure it’s not tiring or just confusing after a while. There are plenty of suitable fonts in a standard installation of Word on Windows and Mac, so just choose a serif font that you like. If you’re using any unusual characters in your text, read my post Font-slapped: A Cautionary Tale before you start. As for font size, 12pt is a good starting point for most serif fonts. Remember that larger print is more readable, but it increases your page count and your unit cost, but don’t go too far the other way and produce a cheap, but unreadable, book. Make a Move uses Times New Roman in 12pt, and I’m very happy with the readability and appearance.

Step Five – Hyphenation

Hyphenation is the process whereby Word breaks long words over two lines to avoid spacing a line out to much, leaving lots of white space. You can hyphenate manually, but Word does a surprisingly good job with some tweaking.

First, select all of the text in the document, then go to Format > Paragraph and deselect the option Don’t hyphenate. You can reselect it for specific paragraphs later if needed. Next, go to Tools > Hyphenation and select Automatically hyphenate document. Click OK, and inspect your text. You should see words broken with a hyphen pretty soon, if not on page one. You need to decide how much hyphenation is acceptable to you. I looked at a lot of books, and decided that three hyphenated words per page was my limit, and that I didn’t want to see more than one hyphenated line in a row. In the Hyphenation dialog, set the Limit consecutive hyphens to option to your chosen value (1 in my case) and click OK. From here, it’s a process of trial an error. Read from page one until you find a page with more than your upper hyphen limit. When you find one, go back into the Hyphenation dialog and increase the Hyphenation zone setting by a small amount before clicking OK. Start reading again until you find the next page with more than your limit of hyphenation, then repeat the process. I think it took me six runs to get the hyphenation to within my limit.

Step Six – Widows and Orphans

Widows and orphans occur when the first line of a new paragraph begins at the bottom of a page, or the last line of a paragraph begins at the top of a new page. Word avoids this by default, moving lines around to join these isolated chunks of text, but this leaves pages with one or two blank lines at the bottom, which looks bad. Disable this automatic behaviour by selecting all of your text, then going to Format > Paragraph and deselecting the Widow/Orphan control option (you can do this earlier, but it should affect your hyphenation much, if at all, doing it after). You’ll now be stuck with (hopefully) a few widow/orphan lines. There are two ways to deal with this.

• As you’re the writer, and have creative control, you can look for lines with only one or two words, or that miss breaking onto a new line by one or two words, and rewrite to force the addition/removal of a line. This sounds flaky, as who would place the needs of typesetting above the integrity of your text, but it can be valid if the change is small and yields the results you want.
• You can adjust the line spacing for a few lines near the bottom/top of the page in question. This is the “proper” way to do it, but you need to be careful to make tiny changes to just enough lines, so that the difference in spacing is invisible to the reader. To change the line spacing, just select the lines you want to change, then select Format > Paragraph and add a point of spacing Before the selected lines.

Summary

Again, I want to reiterate that I’m not a professional typesetter, but I achieved great results using these techniques. Most self-publishing authors can’t afford the services of a professional typesetter, and might see this phase of production as an insurmountable obstacle. I want to dispel that myth, but I’d also love for any pros with advice to comment, even if they shoot down my techniques. I learned by experimentation and got to where I needed to be, but I’m still ready to learn more.

No one was shat on in the process of getting my book to market.

I’ll explain by way of a couple of examples.

1. If you buy cheap meat from a supermarket, the animal who provided your food was subjected to the absolute bare minimum living conditions for its entire pitiful existence. Outdoor-reared, humanely-kept animals cost more in upkeep over the duration of their life, so you pay more for the meat. Of course, both are killed and eaten, but that’s another discussion. Relatively speaking, it’s the battery chicken getting shat on. Literally in this case.
2. If you buy your kid a cheap school shirt from a supermarket, you’ll save a few pounds that you could maybe put towards Christmas, or a day out, or some sweets, whatever. The person who made that shirt got paid so little that they can barely afford to feed their kids, let alone buy them a bar of chocolate. I know that this is another situation where the politics are complicated (if you paid more, would they get paid more? Probably not…) but the balance of the equation is that they get shat on so you can save a quid or two.
3. If you buy a book from a supermarket – say the new Terry Pratchett – there’s a good chance that the supermarket is selling it at near to or below cost (the latter tends to be the case with event titles like Harry Potter). You get the book for around £5, and the supermarket gets you through the door to spend your wages on the weekly shop. Have you spotted the person being shat on in this equation? Yes, it’s the owner of the independent book shop who doesn’t have tinned goods to sell and is relying on sales of event titles to keep trading. He/she can’t sell that book for less than cost, and their sales dry up.

Through all of the transactions that I’ve been involved with in the production of Make a Move, I’ve always asked myself this question first: is it fair? My printer was happy with the price I paid, as was I. I’m going to absorb some of the postage and packing cost for my online customers (once online ordering is live) as I want to offer a fair total price for the delivered book. When I found out how long Sam had been working on my cover art, I changed the deal, because he’d been putting in so much time, the original deal wasn’t fair any more.

I’m not trying to be a saint; I’m just trying to have fun, and shitting on people to get what I want isn’t fun. My book costs more because it’s been ethically sourced. You’re not happy with the £12.99 price? No problem.

Just head on over to Tesco and buy yourself a nice, cheap battery book.

It’s flattering that people are impressed with the quality of the product, but it’s also worrying that their expectations are so low. That got me thinking; if customer’s have so little faith in a self-publishing author to deliver a professionally printed book, does that also extend to writers’ faith in their ability to produce one?

Probably, and that’s one misconception that needs kicking into touch right now.

One fact you might not be aware of: you have access to the same printers as the major publishing houses. It’s true; you can deal direct with the printers, and with the publishing industry so downbeat right now, a lot of printers are trying to attract indies and small presses in an effort to adapt and survive. The only difference between you and a major publisher is the order size (which has one minor implication I’ll detail below). Aside from that, it’s a level playing field.

Don’t believe me? Okay – let’s assume you’ve placed an order for 100 hardback books (a typical minimum for digital printing) and take a look at the anatomy of the end product.

1. Dust Jacket – it’s a sheet of paper. They print your artwork on it, laminate it in gloss or matt for a nominal fee (if you choose) and wrap it around the book.
2. Binding – fabric-covered cardboard. I guess you could use some expensive fabric woven by Parisian chorus girls in their spare time, but as there’s a dust jacket hiding it from view, it’s not going to add much value. I can’t see any difference between my binding and any of the hundreds of “pro” books on my shelves.
3. Spine Embossing – this is a nice touch. I thought about saving the money, but I believe it does add value, and it’s useful to identify the book if the owner loses the dust jacket. All the printers ask for is a print-ready PDF with the lettering in black; they make up a “brass”, and use that to stamp the books.
4. Endpapers – these are the sheets of paper glued onto the inside of the book cover, joining them to the pages seamlessly. You can go for the same colour as your book’s body pages, but I think it looks nicer to go for a different colour – graphite in my case. These definitely add something to the look of the book, but you need to decide if it’s worth the extra cost. The endpapers my printer provided are very cool, with a thick, grainy texture.
5. Paper – this is the one area where large publishers have the option to go one better. Note that I said “option”; this isn’t a default choice. The papers available for use with digital presses are perfect for the job, but for larger print runs – over 1000 or so – litho presses become cost-effective, and these can handle thicker paper, which some publishers may choose to use. By “thicker”, I don’t mean that each sheet is visibly thicker than the lighter, digital-friendly weights; what I mean is that the paper responds differently when you bend a half-inch thickness of it, and it may be slightly more opaque. This is the kind of difference only a borderline-OCD perfectionist like me would notice, but it’s something you can investigate yourself.

So that’s it. There’s nothing else to a book. Okay – so there are custom jobs you could point to; my hardback copy of Rant by Chuck Palahniuk has a crazy image printed inside the dust jacket. I spotted it for the first time when I was inspecting the book as research for my print run, over a year after I read it.

Are you convinced? Are you happy that your self-published book won’t look like the poor cousin on a mainstream-fed bookcase? If you are, that’s one less barrier between you and your readers. If you’re not, just check out some printers and ask for samples; see for yourself.

I asked my friend, Mark, who knows more about books than everyone else I know put together, what font he’d like to see. His response: as long as I can read it and it’s not Comic Sans, who cares? That left me with plenty of choice.

Due to my setup, I needed a font that I had on both Windows and Apple machines. I looked at Garamond, Book Antiqua, Georgia, Palatino Linotype – all common, but perfectly serviceable fonts, and not boring, generic, overused Times New Roman. With the subtle differences from that most ubiquitous of typefaces, I had plenty of fonts from which to choose. I couldn’t lose.

Yeah I could.

Late in the book, I introduced some characters crucial to the story. Characters from Latvia, with Latvian names. And of course, I wanted to show off a bit and choose names with some of the curious accents common in the Latvian language. I set myself a short timescale to finish the print-ready files to send to my printer, as I knew I needed that pressure to stop me from picking over every detail a hundred times and just get it done, so when I found the Latvian names at the end of the book filled with black rectangles – indicating that those characters were unavailable in the selected font – I didn’t have much time to fix the problem. I didn’t want to go back to the research and choose new names – these characters were alive in the book now, and their names had stuck – so I ran through my list of suitable fonts, desperate to find one with support for those crazy accents.

Of course, there was only one serif font on both systems with the character support. Times New Fricking Roman.

The book text looks good – looks great in fact – but I’m a control freak and I wanted my choice of fonts. When you’ve committed to managing every tiny detail yourself, things like this are important. Hell, every detail is important.

So the moral of the story? Keep things simple and don’t show off; it’s the little things that’ll come back and bite you in the ass.