My print adventures

Publishing a printed book is much less forgiving than producing an e-book. I have known that since I started working with electronic publishing, lo many years ago. But I really felt it with the production of my third book, Army of Worn Soles.

I have printed books before, and I thought getting a print version of my third would be a piece of cake. And it was—until I made my own life my difficult by making the books itself more complex and using photographs within. No, it’s not hard to do, but getting the results you want means you have to follow some pretty strict guidelines. 

Here are some of the lessons that I had to re-learn.

Use them when you prepare your own books for printing through CreateSpace, Lightning Source or any other printing service.

Word perspective

There are some things about document design and layout that I knew about even before I started writing. 

• Use proper opening and closing quotation marks, not straight quotes/inch marks. 
• Use real, curvy apostrophes, not inch marks instead of apostrophes.
• Double-check to make sure you’re using a real open quote ‘ instead of apostrophe ’. Most modern word processors like Microsoft Word and Pages automatically format these for you. If you’re not getting quotation marks at the beginning of the quote that point in the opposite direction from the marks at the end, go to your Preferences or Options menu and select “smart quotes.”
• Use the Ruler in your word processor, or the Styles menu, to indent the first line of paragraphs.   —but remember not to indent the first paragraph after any heading or subheading. Don’t double-space paragraphs unless you’re writing a business guide or something similar. Definitely do not double-space paragraphs in fiction.
• Learn the differences between hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes. 
• Use the hyphen to join compound words, like “north-west.” 
• En dashes are twice as long as hyphens. Use them to indicate a range in numbers, like “August 3–4.” You’ll enter it by typing Ctrl-hyphen or, on a Mac, Option-hyphen. 
• An em-dash is twice as wide as the en-dash. Use it to break a sentence to indicate a new idea or a brief break in the logical flow—like this. Enter it with Shif-Alt-Hyphen, or on a Mac, Shift-Option-Hyphen. Decide whether you want to have spaces on either side of your em-dashes — like this — or not—like this—and use them consistently.

Come up to the page

When I got my first job at a subsidiary of one of the Big Five publishing companies, I learned to think about book layout in terms of the two-page spread. When readers look at a book, usually they see a left, or verso page, next to a right, or recto. In the West, where we read left to right, we tend to start with a right-hand page, so the left is the back, or verso, of the right-hand page.

Left hand pages have even numbers, right pages have odd numbers, because we start page 1 on the right-hand side, then turn it over. Word allows “mirroring margins,” so that you have opposite left and right margins, and a different setting for the “gutter.”

Image courtesy Knite Writes http://knitewrites.com/2013/11/25/formatting-for-createspace-the-knite-way/

Depending on whom you talk to, the outside margin—left on the verso (left) page, right on the recto—should be either wider or narrower than when laying out pages that are to be printed on one side only.

Createspace asks for a wider gutter—right margin on the left page, opposite on the other side— because of the perfect binding—the flat, glued spine of the book. With a thick, perfect-bound book, text too close to the spine is harder to read. Createspace offers a Word template that has a suggested width for left, right and gutter margins.

Headers and footers

With opposite pages, you can have opposite formats for headers and footers.

The first thing to realize here is that the first page of every document and every chapter has a different format. In Word, choose “Different first page” from the Layout menu. In Apple’s Pages, select Setup—Section—“Hide (Headers and footers) on first page of section.”

The second thing to remember is that left and right pages necessarily have opposite treatments of page numbering.

Traditionally, when it comes to fiction, publishers have not done much about this. Looking at some old books I have, I notice that typically, the verso page has the author’s name, while the recto bears the title of the book. Page numbers are centred on the bottom, or the footer.

With textbooks, on the other hand, the page number (folio, in publishing jargon) is on the outside corner —that is, on the far left of the header or footer of the left-hand/verso page, and on the far right of the recto. 

Personally, I think it’s much better. Think about how you use a book. Pick up a print book, the one closest to you right now. Turn to page 96. How do you do that? You hold the book’s spine in one hand, and use the opposite thumb to flip through the pages. How much more difficult it will be to find page 96 if the folio were in the gutter, instead of on the outside? 

Sometimes for very long books or anthologies, one header may have the name of the author of that chapter, while the other page has the title of the whole anthology, or sometimes the theme of the current section.

For example, my 1999 edition of Lord of the Rings, three-volume set has the book title (eg. The Fellowship of the Ring) on the left/verso, and the chapter title, eg. “A Short Cut to Mushrooms,” on the right/recto. The page numbers are on the outside corners of the header, and the footers are blank.

The textbooks that I worked on had a much more complex treatment. Headers or footers would show the part and chapter titles, along with the page number, in the outside corner.

It’s important to put the folio in the outside corner. 

How to accomplish this

In Word or Pages, you can change the header and footer from one page to the next this way:

• Go to the Header and Footer or Page Layout menu and select “different first page.” 
• Inserting a Section Break at the end of each chapter and deselect the “Continue from previous” button in the Header/Footer menu.

This gives you four areas to put four different kinds of information:

• book title
• part title
• chapter title
• author.

When I was writing my first novel, I sent a preliminary draft to a beta reader who had pretensions to being a publisher. I thought I would send something that would imitate a professionally printed book, as far as possible with the technology and my experience at the time, so I did those very things:

• set up facing pages
• put the folios (page numbers) on the outside corners
• put the name of the series of the book (The Dark Age) on the left (verso) footer
• put the name of the book (The Bones of the Earth) on the recto footer
• put the part title (Part 1, Initiation Rites; Part 2: Tests; Part 3: The Mission) on the left header
• put the chapter title in the right header.

The beta reader went ballistic on this. “What are you doing! A publisher just wants to see the page numbers in the header or the footer. This is way too fancy.” But why? It’s information that adds to the experience for the reader. If you don’t want to see it, don’t look—in fact, when we read a book, this fades into the background.

While Word makes this pretty straightforward, Apple’s Pages word processing program has no facing pages option, so this is very frustrating.

Take care with photographs

The photo of the author (me) in the print version of my first two books didn’t turn out so well. They looked great in the e-book, but muddy in physical form. 

Turns out I made a rookie mistake, one I should have known better than to commit. I have worked for years in print, after all, and I remember telling other people to do this very thing: don’t print .jpg-format images.

If you have a photograph or any other image to print, you have to make sure that you’re sending the printer a file that will print well. Make sure you do at least these things:

• In your photo editor program, change the colour space to either Grayscale for black-and-white, or CMYK if you’re printing in colour.
• Set the resolution to at least 300 dpi. More isn’t really necessary, but less will look terrible.
• Save the image as a .TIFF or .EPS format file.
• Import the high-resolution .TIFF file into your word processor or page layout program.
• If you have to send the printer a PDF, make sure your resolution and colour space match the printer’s requirements. Make sure that the page layout program’s resolution for images is also set to at least 300 dpi, CMYK.

Lightning Source requires a PDF (Acrobat) format file. Here are some other settings to check before you upload your file:

• Page size—the default for your .pdf output is probably 8 ½ by 11 inches. This will not produce a book. Change the page dimensions, margins, bleed and trim settings to Lightning Source’s (or whichever printer you’re using) specifications.
• Page orientation—again, check whether the output will give you the results you expect. Test it on your own printer first.
• Fonts—if you’re using a special font, you will have to embed them in the .pdf. You can do this with the Printer settings.

Producing your printed cover is even more complex by a factor of magnitude. I’ll cover that in a future post.

For now, for those working on formatting their print books, this is just a place to start. But following these tips will get you past the initial errors that a lot of people make.

Tell me about your experiences in print.

Microsoft Word versus Apple Pages—A comparative review

Creative Commons

Occasionally, you have to hand it to the dark side. For years, over a decade, in fact, I’ve known and acknowledged that Microsoft Word is the best word processor.

I did not want to acknowledge that, though. I wanted there to be something better than the market leader and de facto standard. But my latest experience in publishing my latest book has only reinforced that conclusion.

I used OpenOffice's word processor and then Pages to write the book, which were fine when the goal was producing an e-book. I found Pages especially useful in that I could use it on both my desktop Macintosh and my iPad.

But when it came to formatting the book for print, well, using OpenOffice is downright aggravating, and Pages lacks some of the feature essential to producing a professional grade printed book.

My reaction to Pages

Pages is a light and easy to use application. It only costs $19.99 from the App store, and the iPad version is only ten bucks. On the other hand, Word for the Mac can only be had as part of the Microsoft Office, which costs $139 for the Home version, or $99 per year for the Web-based subscription.

One of Pages' productive feature is the way that it automatically saves your new files and updates in iCloud. This made it simple to switch between using my desktop computer in my office and my iPad while mobile. 

Pages’ user interface is characteristically clean and inviting on the desktop computer. The iPad version, though, features a shade of orange that I, personally, don’t like.

I reached the iPad version's limits quickly. It’s almost impossible to format paragraphs using the ruler at the top of the screen. I don’t know if my fingers are too thick and blunt or what, but the only way I could change the paragraph indents was to enlarge the view to at least 200 percent, and even then, it difficult to select the icons to move the margins.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be a Styles feature in the iPad version, where I can set the typeface, font size, paragraph spacing and other typographical features for blocks of text and headlines and change them with one command. This is standard in full featured word processors.

Finally, the major limitation on both the mobile and desktop versions of Pages is the lack of a facing pages feature. It just doesn’t seem to have entered the programmers’ minds.

What I need for print layout

Formatting an e-book is relatively simple compared to print output , because much of the format of the e-book is determined by the e-reader device. Sure, you can choose typeface and whether paragraphs are double-spaced or indented on the first line. But when you go to print, there are many aspects beyond those that you have to control.

When laying out a printed book, you have to consider the page spread—two facing pages, left and right. If you look at a professionally produced book, especially a textbook, you’ll see that the page layout elements are mirrors of each other. For example, if the page number (“folio” in old book layout parlance) is on top right corner of the right-hand page, it will be in the left corner of the left-hand (even-numbered, if you do it right) page.

The page spread. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Word has a simple means of allowing this: you just check “Different Odd & Even Pages” when formatting the Header or Footer.

Without this, you could put your page numbers in the centre of the header (top) or footer (bottom) of the page. But you cannot set your document to have the book title on the right hand pages and your name as the author on the left. There’s just no way to do that in Pages.

What I like about Word

Word offers everything you could ask for in a word processor: typing aids, a fully featured Styles menu, control over every aspect of not just wording, character style and page layouts, but also output to .pdf and e-pub format.

I can use Pages, but I have to use work-arounds. For instance, if I want to save the document in a format (like .doc) so that a non-Mac user can share it, I can’t just Save As a .doc. Instead, I have to Export a copy of the file. That means I now have two separate files, which leads to version control problems.

Just use the .doc version from then on, you say? Easy enough with Word, or most other programs. But the people at Apple have taken a bizarre approach. It will open the files with the .doc filename extension, but convert it on the spot to .pages format. Saving it in Word format requires saving it first as a .pages document, then Exporting it again to Word format. It’s not a big deal, but it is an extra step that gets annoying.

Workarounds. Image Creative Commons

Word is a big, expensive program with more features than any one person will ever use. But it does give me all the tools that I need for electronic and print publishing. For that reason, it will have to remain my word processing choice.

Internet dependence

I'm writing this post on vacation, and I realize that I need more than an hour of Internet access per day.

If I want to get anything concrete done, that is. 

And it's not my fault. The things I want to do on the Internet each day, if I could just do them quickly, would probably take me about 20 minutes.

Except for writing blog posts, of course. 

My situation

I'm on the Mayan Riviera for a 10-day all-inclusive vacation with my lovely wife, Roxanne (I know, boo-hoo), where I get to access the free WiFi network for at most an hour a day. I could have 24/7 access, but that costs more money. (My grandparents were Scottish.) So, I've been working with an hour's daily  access.

It's been very relaxing and refreshing. I've been mostly disconnected from the real world down here, and I'm only sporadically informed about the Montreal-New York series, the Ukrainian election, Russian invasions, celebrity deaths, mass shootings (blind guess about that, but I'm probably right), and other depressing news.

"You're supposed to be on a beach vacation, not spending all your time looking at the Internet" my lovely wife says when I grumble. So I have another (price included) drink and splash into the Caribbean, or talk to the iguanas. They never complain about limited WiFi, so I guess I shouldn't, either.

And I've learned something valuable: the Internet tortures me whenever I use it, but I do it so much I haven't noticed until I've disconnected.

How the Internet tortures me:

1. Making me wait. Has anyone ever added up all the time we waste waiting for the computer or the network or whatever to stop spinning the ball or the hourglass and update the work we've just done? To make that connection, already, to save the file? When your access is limited to an hour in total—working and uploading as well as waiting for the app to launch and the various servers to shake hands—you really notice all those delays.

2. Limited apps. I love my iPad, but when it's all I have for blogging, email, web surfing and social media, I really notice the differences, the limitations of the mobile apps compared to the full desktop versions. 

Take Facebook, for example. I cannot select a portion of a Facebook post, copy it and paste it into Twitter on the iPad. I don't know if it's because of the touch-screen interface or some combination of settings, but that's completely intuitive on the desktop version.

Hootsuite's iPad app doesn't have bulk tweet scheduling, which is the main reason I use the service in the first place.

In the desktop version of Pages, my clumsy fingers find it almost impossible to change the indents on paragraphs.

The iPad version of Blogger, which I am using to write this very post, doesn't allow me to indent whole paragraphs, or have bulleted and numbered paragraph formats. It also does not appear to have a Schedule feature, like in the full version.

I know, first world problems. But they slow down what I try to do, so I cannot accomplish in an hour what should take twenty minutes: 

- check the email and delete all the junk. On the iPad, I tend to delete news releases and social media updates, leaving them to the desktop when I have more time to devote to them. The iPad only has so much memory, and I try to restrict it to stuff I need immediately.

- check Twitter for mentions

- check the blog status for number of pageviews yesterday and comments, and publish the real ones (as opposed to spam)

- check Google+ and Facebook for important updates and announcements

- upload a new daily spreadsheet to Hootsuite.

If everything went quickly, if apps and networks responded without delay, I am sure that I could accomplish all that in 20 minutes. Okay, maybe half an hour.

Granted, it will take me 15 to 20 minutes to create a .csv file for uploading to Hootsuite. I need more time to respond to the important emails, write some of my own, and of course write blog posts like this.

But being restricted to an hour a day? It's just frustrating.

All that to say, I'll be back in full form, rested, recharged and full of new ideas in a matter of days. Till then, faithful readers, keep on questioning.