Publishing Secrets Revealed!

I checked in with Soupy Sales for permission and he agreed to my using his marketing scheme. Get your parents wallet, take one dollar and send it to me, courtesy The Studio and I will send to you my Proven Way To Millions (of farthings) In Publishing or, How To Grow A Groucho Marx Mustache In Three Easy Steps.

If you're too impatient to do so, or to chicken to steal from your parents or you haven't learnt how to address an envelope yet, I'll take pity on you and provide some tidbits on how to produce a nicely done pdf. Bear in mind these are my opinions, my workflows, my way of doing things and as such, may have little to do with the way you chose to do things. This Way is based on what Lightning Source asks for as well as many other print shops I've worked with. It's vital to check with your printer to find out what specs they require for the particular machinery they use.

Warning: Macintosh Heavy Environment Follows!

Software

1. Desk Top Publishing: Apple Pages. I use Pages because I am too cheap to buy InDesign and too lazy to learn InDesign. I did try InDesign but found it to be too annoying and besides which I already had a copy of Pages and found it fine for my purposes. Coupled with Acrobat Pro, you can turn out pretty much what you need for your average book. True, there are limits but if you work within those limits, yer golden. Don't mess with MS Word. Word carries with it lots of extraneous code which can play havoc with the final product. If you must use Word, break your Great American Novel up into chapters and wait to put them together until you get to Acrobat. Free word processing programs are ok, but you get what you pay for. Best of luck to ya. Same goes for pay for play desk top publishing programs where again, you get what you pay for, if you get what I mean. Buy the best and you get the best. Or in my case, if you can't afford to, spend a helluva lot on a Mac Pro Tower and buy Pages. If you are a Windows type of person, I'm not your man. I only use Windows if I have to so I really can't recommend anything for the Evil Empire
2. PDF creation: Adobe Acrobat Pro with Distiller. Now is not the time to cry poverty and buy a cheap pdf creator or use a free one. The end product will never be the same. If you want to produce a professional product over which you have total control, you need Acrobat Pro and Distiller. You can use the online Adobe service. When it's working. If your document is basic, lacking in fancy characters, doesn't have lots of images or peculiar formatting, etc. Best of luck to ya. 
3. PDF format: PDF/X-1a:2001. This is why you need Distiller. No questions on this one. This is a must. You can send a different format up to the printer but at their end they will likely process it to this format and who knows what will happen. If you want to see what your baby looks like, you need to get it right at your end first. Doing it right allows you to check for properly embedded fonts, which includes the possibility of tons of duplicate embeds or orphans. It allows you to check of color changes, a distinct possibility as what you see on your monitor ain't what you're gonna see in real life. In many cases, the end result will be darker when CMYK hits the road. And don't worry about SWOP. Leave that to the Police.
4. Layout specs: .5 inch margins all around at the minimum. .75 gutter if you can swing it. .75 bottom margin can be very nice visually too, depending on leading. So can a .75 top and bottom, .75 gutter and .5 outside. Speaking of leading (pronounced 'leading', not 'leading'), this term comes from the lead used to make spacer bars in old fashioned letter press printing. I think even linotype setups used this too. Leading is the space between the lines. Very important, particularly if you are going to use Serif fonts. You know, those fonts with the little dangly things that fall off the letters? I'm not a typographer so I won't go into that topic. I usually set leading to anywhere from 1.25 to 1.75 depending upon the font and the font size. Or I leave it along, again depending upon the font. I have a fondness for Adobe Caslon Pro or Big Caslon so often leading is left as is because Adobe Knows Best. Tracking is the space between the font characters. Don't track lower case fonts else Mr. Tanner swats your behind with his neoprene mouse mat.
5. More layout specs: Basically, a book is 2 up. Forget all the other 'ups'. It's all tech talk. Books are done up in even numbers. The odd page is the first page you see, the even page is the verso of the odd page. Get it? Open a book. Forget about the blank pages for a moment. You see page 1 (odd page). Turn it and the other side (the Verso) is the next page, number 2 ( an even page) and so on. Odd, Even, Odd, Even. What can I say? Printers are Odd Fellows. If you are setting up your book with blank pages before chapter beginnings, you have to figure out your pagination, otherwise known as your page numbering (odds and evens). Just wrap your head around Odd and Even. In the technical field we call it 1 and 2. 
6. Covers: Don't ask me, ask Wesley Tanner, he knows lots more. Or ask Joel Friedlander. He also knows more. Just don't ask me. If you do ask me, you're getting an answer from a color blind book cover designer. Do you really want that sort of an answer? For the record, I use Book Cover Pro, a nifty bit of software that really makes the job easy. It's Windows and Mac compatible, but not Mac 10.7 yet. If you insist on doing your covers on your own, as I do (once again because I am an iconoclastic, nyah nyah your mother wears army boots sorta guy) get your spine safeties, trim and bleed areas, total width and heights, etc. correct. Sometimes I get it right the first time but usually I don't and have to pay for a second or third go-around until I figure it out. I really should write down what I did wrong the last time but that would be too sensible and I'm an iconoclast, right?
7. ISBN: buy your own from Bowker if you're in the US. Buy in blocks of ten cause it's a good deal. Don't fall for the CreateSpace so-called free ISBN or any other free ISBN deal cause then they own the ISBN and not you. Once you own the ISBN and once you enter the data in Bowker, the book will show up in Books In Print, thus in Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and every other online entity that subscribes to Books In Print.
8. Distribution: If you apply to Lightning Source, the print arm of Ingram, you must, I repeat, you must pay for Ingram distribution unless you have some nefarious reason for flying under the publishing radar. Ingram Distribution will get you into the vast majority of the book selling world, including England, Europe, Australia and the Pacific Rim. It's cheap and worth it unless you are flying at 300 feet. What is Distribution you ask? Distibution is the publishing term for someone else pushing your book on the world of booksellers. In print on demand, it's simply a company marketing your title to online and brick & mortar booksellers and libraries as an available title. Trust me, on your own you will not get your book into libraries or large bookstores. No. Not ever. 
9. Amazon, or as I prefer to call it, the Big A: Get yourself signed up with Marketplace. Not because you will make any money there, but because you will want to access the SITB, or, as the real world calls it, Search Inside The Box feature as well as the opportunity to undercut the multitude of scam artists who populate Amazon. There are these cute programs out there that allow these outfits to grab ISBN's en masse, check the going prices, lower their price by a tiny bit and attempt to grab the Amazon sale. You can play around with that if you wish, or ignore it all together. Once in awhile I thumb my nose at them and lower my prices to crazy levels just to see what happens. I think I get four sales a year through my Marketplace storefront. If the Big A starts messing with your titles in any way, don't waste your time trying to contact them. You won't get anywhere. Take your energy and do some creative marketing elsewheres. Whatever you try to do with Amazon, I guarantee that within the year, Amazon will change it's policies yet again and all your plans will be for naught.
10. Back to layout Specs: Yes, this is free form advice here. If you are using Acrobat Pro and Distiller, the vast majority of the specs provided by Lightning Source and other print services can be ignored once you select the PDF/X-1a:2001 format. Get your margins right and you should be ok.
11. Halftones: The bane of digital printing. Halftones give me tsuris. If your book has any halftone images in it, you have to add a little gaussian blur in the hopes of correcting the moire pattern when it's printed. I add gaussian blur, or smoothing at 1 pixel in Photoshop Elements and usually it helps. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes there's not much to be done without blurring the image to the point where you can't do anything without ending up with a useless smudge.
12. Pricing: Don't get all bent out of shape over prices and discounts. Really! Really! Take a pill and watch some SNL and some Conan. All this short discount stuff is a bunch of hooey so far as I'm concerned. I set my discounts for distribution at 50% and 55%, both standard trade discounts. This is what the major and minor booksellers want to see. This means more sellers are inclined to sell my books. I price my books according to what the market will bear, not according to what I think I want to make. People! It's a business, not a dictatorship! Price it right and sell more, price it too high and sell less, get it? There's a point where the whole "I'm an independent author/publisher" thing got old and non-workable. Take a look at what books in your genre are selling for, and I mean the ones that are really selling and price your books within that range. Keep your discounts reasonable unless you want to shell out stacks of dimes for thousands of copies, store them in your basement and have to spend your days packing and shipping instead of fishing off your back porch! No succesful business ever said: This is how much I have to make per item therefore this is how much I have to price the item. The question is, how much can I ask per item, how much can I net per item and how many do I have to sell to make the profit goals I want? Maybe I don't want to make a profit on some items. Maybe some are loss leaders or even giveaways.
13. eBooks: Join the IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association. It's worth every cent. You'll learn more than you knew you didn't know. For instance, the latest data on eBook sales says that fiction eBooks are outselling paper fiction. But, nonfiction paper, particularly reference, are outselling eBook nonfiction. Which is to say, I've been right. Both media have there place and eBooks are not taking over the world.

In closing, I'ld just like to point out that I'm largely self taught. A few courses here and there at Simmons during the course of my grad degree in Library Science but mostly learning by doing, which is to say, learning by making lots of mistakes. The major lesson I learned early on was to invest in the software and hardware that did the job Right. Whenever I went cheap or free, I got a headache. On rare occasions, such as Vuescan over Silverscan, less can be more. Otherwise, do it right in the beginning and make your life easier.

till next, Gary