You should make one, too.

Do-It-Yourself Book Production
by Hamish MacDonald

There's an updated version of this article here.

In 1999, I completed my first novel, doubleZero (for a review, see Broken Pencil, issue #12). I wrote a novel because that was the next thing for me to do as a writer. When I started, I wasn’t thinking about the outcome, about what I wanted to do with the story when it was finished. It was a thing done simply for its own sake. Although quite accidental, that attitude served me very well, and is one that I’m struggling to recapture as I write my second book, The Willies. My intentions were pure, not compromised by trying to second-guess the audience, publishers, or booksellers-guesses that would have done nothing but warp my story into a semblance of somebody else’s work.

Because of this attitude, though, I didn’t do much preparation for sending the manuscript out into the world. I didn’t realize how long it takes editors to respond to unsolicited manuscripts (one took nine months, many did not respond at all). That meant that the novel, whose story was time-sensitive (a Y2K story-I know, I know, but honestly, it was different; pay the twelve bucks, read it, then judge me), was of no use to publishers, since they couldn’t put it out in time. One small press was interested, but ultimately couldn’t afford the risk: it had to be published outside the normal schedule and had to make all its money back in a set time frame. So I had a completed manuscript, and no one to publish it. Not content to do an Emily Dickinson and leave it in a drawer for posterity, I decided to publish it myself. And that meant I had a lot to learn, and quickly.

The first thing I learned about self-publishing is that the literary world considers it roughly equivalent to defecating in the middle of a formal dinner party. No grants, no awards, no memberships-none of this is open to the self-published, because such work is not considered "professional" (though few Canadian authors live off their writing income). One possible explanation given to me for this attitude is that self-published works don’t make any money for publishers. Another, I was told, is that much self-published work is crap-it looks like crap, and it’s had crap attention paid to the details.

I can’t do anything about the former; the media moguls have their ground. But if you want to sidestep them and hope for a literary Blair Witch effect, I can help you with the latter, the details of publishing a book. And if you’ve bothered to write a book, do yourself the favour of admitting that you want to affect others by sharing it. It sounds trite to say, but most buyers do judge a book by its cover. But don’t worry: you can produce a "professional" book by being creative, decisive, and smart. In this guide, I’ll help you focus your efforts this way by sharing what I learned while producing my first book.

Designing Your Book

Okay, it’s finished, and ready to print. Now what? Well, getting a designer, then doing typesetting, page layout, and cover design. This is the soup-to-nuts part of the guide, and it gets very computery. But that’s how this work is done, and this is what you’ll be expected to have thought about.

2a. Getting a Designer

Asking for favours is hard for some people. People like me. I hate it. Thank God I do graphic design all day, so I didn’t have to ask someone else to do it. If you don’t already have this skill, well, you’re going to need to find someone who has it.

Print Shops
They range from Kinko’s, whose primary concern is photocopying, up to print bureaus. This option is expensive, and you can’t guarantee that they care about your project. If you give them mistakes, they will print them and charge you. They’re not in the publishing business.

Relatives and Friends
They can operate a computer, but does that mean they’re a good designer? Yes, your cousin made the definitive "Gillian-Anderson’s-Head-on-Nude-Bodies" web page, but you need more than that. Your book is not something you want to just execute, to get done. It’s art inside, and deserves to be art on the outside. Find that friend whose previous efforts you like, the one who brings talent to the machine, who has ability and taste even when the computer’s off. And they have to know about sending the end result to a print bureau. (I’ll give you more info on that below.)

Cynthia pipes in: You must have a professional graphic designer if you want your book to look professional. After all of the time and energy you've poured into your project, the last leg of the relay race is NOT the time to wimp out. Look at their portfolio. Make sure they have the skills and talent to make your book visually rock. Readers make the decision to fork over their money (or not) from seeing the cover, and flipping through the pages for about thirty seconds. That is a very important half a minute, so you need it to convey to them that this book is worth their cash.

How to Get a Designer and Keep Them

a) You must be able to answer the question "What’s in it for them?" (Pardon the clunky genderless pronouns to follow.) You want them to be involved until the end of the project, not just until they get bored or annoyed with you. Be authentic in your approach, ‘cause tricks wear off when you’re asking for another dozen changes. Is there a creative opportunity in it for them? Really, or are you just saying that? Help them to see your vision; speak to their personal commitments. Maybe that’s the incentive, getting to take part in a shared dream. Or maybe there’s a price. (I like sex, for instance.)

b) Be decisive. You can keep the designer happy by knowing what you want before approaching them and engaging their time. Maybe that means field research, finding other books that achieve the effect you want, or being able to articulate what you don’t want.

c) Respect the designer’s ability. You’re the source of the inspiration, yes, but balance your gut feelings with professional respect for the designer’s experience. Or you will lose them as quick as spit.

Cynthia raises her hand: If you can't pay your designer with money, see if you can barter a way to pay them back with time. If they are taking the time to design your book, perhaps you could reciprocate by walking their dog, doing their dishes, being their "lovely assistant" while they work on your book. Be mindful of the time they are donating to your project. Send thank you notes. Hamish's point about the writer doing "field research" before contacting the designer should be emphasized. Stalk bookstores, browse online, rip pages from magazines and bring samples of some looks that you think will work for your book. Don't you dare tell the designer "I'm sure you'll come up with something." If it's your book, you need to wrap your mind around the visual presentation. Yes, you must respect the rules of good design, and do take their word for it when they tell you what will and will not print well. But give them something to start from or they'll be designing in circles and you'll never like anything. (Sorry if I sound snippy, but I've been a professional graphic designer for many years, and uncertain clients are huge time wasters. Don't be that guy.)

2b. Getting Your Words Into the Computer

You’ll do your designer a big favour by keystroking (typing in) your book before involving them. Try to do as little formatting as possible-italics where necessary, but bolding, page breaks, fonts, and all that just have to be removed or get lost when switching to a page layout program. So enter it in a plain text program, or in Microsoft Word, and keep your design impulses in check.

2c. Registering with the Feds

Here’s something else to think about: the imprint on the inside of your book. That’s the part that contains the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and the Cataloguing-in-Print (CIP) information. The former registers your book internationally, and the latter registers you with the National Library of Canada. Getting these listings did nothing to further my book, really, but boy was it cool for me. Suddenly I was-at least in one place in the world-a real author, and a publisher to boot. You have to get the ISBN first, and it’s what many bookstores make their UPC price stickers from (the "swipe-BEEP!" things at the register). It helps anyone who’s going to be dealing with your book, so I’d suggest doing it. In Canada, it's quite easy: you can go here for info and to register online -- there's about a five day turnaround, and it's free. In the USA, I've found information here and there's a $250 processing fee.

The CIP application form is available online. The National Library folk can process both applications, and they don’t cost a dime. You just have to send two copies to the library when they’re printed, at which point they are put in the library archives and considered part of the country’s heritage-not bad, eh?

When you get this information back, your designer will need to put it on the inside left page at the front of your book. It’s important for it to be typeset exactly as it comes back from the National Library office.

If you want to put a UPC on the back of your book, you can obtain an electronic version to drop into your cover design. There's sites that will do one for you (this one costs $10US), and there's shareware software that will generate one when you put in your ISBN. There's also Or if you’re lucky like me, your printer will create it for free.

2d. Typesetting the Pages

There is a monopoly when it comes to design and page layout programs. The bureau or press that prints your book will want it to be laid out in one of those programs. And they’re very expensive. Your pages, for instance, should be laid out in QuarkXPress. It costs about a grand. Which is why everyone steals it. This, of course, is a very bad, very wrong practice that I would never engage in. No, not me. But I bet you know half a dozen people who have Quark, if you ask.

(And if I get too Mac-specific here, that’s because I use a Mac, as do just about all printers.)

Before doing your layout, choose the format for your book. When I did this, I browsed through a bookstore, looking for something that had the right feel for my story. It’s not a big novel, so when I found Todd Klinck’s Tacones, I knew I’d found the right dimensions. I measured it on the spot.

In Quark, you can lay out the pages onscreen exactly as you’ll see them in print. Use a nice, legible font (it should have serifs, those little feet at the ends of the letters, like Roman numerals, ‘cause they’re more readable). Ask your designer to make sure that the font is TrueType, or if it’s Type 1 (a PostScript font) make sure that they also have the printer version of it. Sorry for the gobbledegook, but this stuff becomes very important when you send your files to the printer, so your designer should know or find out about them.

Look out for "widows and orphans"-those stray words or sentences that wind up on a page all by themselves. By squishing the kerning (the space between letters) or leading (pronounced "ledd-ing"; the space between lines), you can usually do away with these. But don’t go overboard, or the page gets hard to read. And be sure to use "smart quotes", the curly kind. The other ones are actually foot and inch marks.

Cynthia says: Good typesetting truly separates the pros from the amateurs. Bribe your designer to spend the time to typeset your book properly. Hopefully you didn't give them a manuscript full of typos and last minute changes in the first place, so they aren't sick of you yet.

Number the pages. In Quark, it’s not very obvious how this is done, so here’s how: on the Master Page layout, draw a text box and insert the characters "<#>" (without the quotes).

2e. The Thing by Which You Will Be Judged

Ahh, the cover. Maybe you have a dream of what it looks like. That’s a good starting place. Now start taking out colours, ‘cause each colour jacks up your price considerably. But there’s hope: two colours can be blended in lots of ways to give the illusion of more colours. Black, for instance, can be reduced to give you gray, or mixed with a lighter colour to give you varying shades of that colour. Or you can go the colour wheel route; pick two colours that will mix nicely, and you get a third.

Or maybe you have no idea at all. That could be tricky, or it could be a blessing. You could trust your designer to create something from scratch. Describe the emotions and ideas of the book, and maybe they can whip up something that captures it. It helps if you do some homework at the library or a bookstore to refine your ideas and give you some examples of what you like that you can show your designer.

A word about creative theft: relax. Even if you start with the most shameless rip-off, it may be nauseatingly derivative, but still won’t be the same, ‘cause it’s got to be altered to fit your book’s title and concept. You’ll find that someone else’s thing won’t fit your work, and you’ll keep changing it ‘til it’s something new. Don’t wait for perfection, just start. Ask yourself what you want the cover to say to someone. When you can articulate that, you’ve got a roadsign to tell you when you’ve arrived.

Now for more technospew: vectors and bitmaps. Bitmaps are images from scans, off the ‘net, or from paint programs like Photoshop. A bitmap is a picture made of of little boxes. If you blow it up, you just get bigger boxes, like that painting of Lincoln that doesn’t look like anything until you’re twenty feet away. They’re trickier to use for your cover, because they have to be at just the right resolution or they’ll look like jaggy-edged shite. And it’s hard to get the colours to match, unless you go with halftones (like black and white, but you can also use blue and white, red and white, etc.).

Vectors, on the other hand, are pictures from programs like Illustrator, or text and shapes in Quark. To the computer, they’re just geometry. So a box is a box, and the computer can do the math to make it big enough to print on the SkyDome, if you should need that. You’re way less likely to run into problems with vectors. That also helps if you want to reuse your cover art for posters or promotional materials.

I did the first version of the cover for doubleZero in Photoshop, with a bunch of scans and drop shadows on type. It would have cost a lot to print, it was blurry, and it would only work at that one size. And at a high enough resolution to print (300-600dpi-which means very dense little boxes), it took forever to work on, ‘cause it was very taxing on my computer.

In the end, I designed the cover in Illustrator. It was much clearer, and was a lot easier to work with. But the printer redid it in Quark, anyway, ‘cause that was easier for him. (Bang-up job, though. Looked just like mine.)

Then there’s finish. That’s the coating on the heavy paper they use for the cover. Generally, it’s matte or gloss. I wanted to do a special treatment, with the whole cover in matte except for a string of glossy numbers. But the glossy printing would count as another colour, raising the price again. So I just went with the printer’s suggestion, which was gloss. But because my cover is black, I can see the fingerprints on the books that have been handled in the stores. They look, well, dogshitty. I recommend matte.

Cynthia agrees: They have some nice laminated coatings now that make the book nearly indestructible. But they are shiny, and I prefer matte too. It's more sophisticated.

2f. Getting Cost Estimates

I nearly got stopped by this. Printing is expensive. My best friend used to be a print production manager, and his old print broker’s best price for the job was $4800. At my job we print a lot of materials; our person’s quote was $4500. I watched my dream grind to a halt.

Then a friend of mine in the lit business told me that Coach House Press offsets their costs by offering print services through their Coach House Printing setup. First they got me with their quote: $3000 for a two-colour job, 500 copies, perfect-bound (the folded over and glued book, like, well, any book you’d see in a store). Then they followed through by being craftsmen, as concerned as I about the end result. They clearly cared about the business of making books. Wherever you might go, look for that. I can’t say enough good about the confidence it instilled in me. My contact at Coach House Printing was John DeJesus, (416) 979-2217.

Cynthia jumps up and down: I second that recommendation wholeheartedly. The moment I walked into Coach House to discuss the printing of Some Words Spoken, my nervousness dissolved. They are crafty elves who understand the feeling and flavour of books.

Five hundred is the least amount you’re likely to print. For every five hundred more you print, the cost drops exponentially. But as a friend recommended (quite rightly, it turns out), you don’t want too many left over-it’s demoralizing. You can do a reprint easily enough, and it’s cheaper than the first run, ‘cause they’ve already made the printing plates.

Cynthia adds: One of the largest parts of the printing cost is the set up of the colour press. Once it's up and running, leaving it to print 1,000 covers instead of 500 is not that much of a difference. We printed extra covers and stashed them, so when our books sell out (!) and we need another 500, the covers are ready to go. We'll only have to pay for the black and white guts of the book, and the binding.

Jim pipes in: An option I used with Infinity Points, a hundred page novella I published in '95, was to use a copy shop. They photocopied the guts of it and I supplied thick stock, full colour covers that I got an outputting service to do from an Illustrator file. The copy shop perfect bound and trimmed the books which ended up being 5.5x8.5 in size. 500 of them cost about $1500. However, I really had to hunt for a copy shop that would do it this cheap, I basically called every one in the yellow pages and left a message telling them the best quote I'd got and asking them to call back if they could beat it. As happy as I was with the final product, I wouldn't do such a high-end novella again: you can't really price 100 page books at much more than $10, and if it's selling in the store that means that $4 goes to the bookstore, $2 goes to the distributor, $3 goes to the copy shop and the remaining $1 is probably swallowed up by incidental costs -- the copies you gave away, etc. In the best case scenario that your print run sells out you'll barely break even.

Another method I've used for 100 pagers is the thick zine approach, just a digest sized & stapled puppy that you can make for $1.50. You can sell them cheaper & do smaller print runs, so you don't have to spend thousands of bucks to get them out there. On the downside, it's harder to get them into bookstores.

Joe Ollman adds: Here's how I perfect-bind my books by hand. The cover stock must be thick enough to hold a crease. Make a creasing board with a piece of wood, xacto knife and ruler. Cut a groove a millimetre deep and wide where the creases of your cover need to be, then use a butterknife to score them. Once they're scored they'll fold easily and without cracking. Apply a bead of glue to the inside of the spine, insert your pages and rub it down so the contact point is made. Then stack them spine down on a bookshelf, putting pressure on the sides and the top, for an hour or so. You can leave it untrimmed (decal style) or you can go to a print shop and use their trimmer to give it a smooth edge.

2g. Delivering Your Baby

QuarkXPress has a feature under the File menu called "Collect for Output". You really want to use that. It takes all the pictures you used and the layout (Quark) file, and puts them in a folder you specify. Then it makes a text file that lists all the pictures and fonts used in the document. Unfortunately, it doesn’t move the fonts, so look closely at this file and move all the fonts from the System Folder to the folder where you ‘collected’ from Quark. Now, technically it’s illegal to give your fonts to the printer, but it’s unlikely that they have your particular version of Scarborough Gothic Roman Extended, so you’ll want to give it to them.

Now take your project’s folder, and transfer everything over onto a Zip disk. Zip is pretty standard; you can walk into most shops and have them read it.

Now go to the printer, and deliver your files. Ask them to show you a proof of the cover and pages before they print. It’s too much of your money at risk to trust anyone. Besides, you’ve already paid half up-front, so they know you’re invested in working with them.

Cynthia adds: The colour of the cover might shift when it goes to press. Your pretty proof from the designer might not match the final product. Make sure you get a proof from the printer and make any colour adjustments at that point. Once they've burned printing plates, it's too late for you to be fussy.

2h. Examining the Proofs

This is your last chance before your words and images are etched in ink for all posterity. Take your time, and give the proof to someone who’s not involved in the project. At this point, you’re so close to the project you’re effectively blind. Take the proofs away from the print shop and take your time with them. Then go back, hand them over, and get excited, ‘cause you’re about to have a book.

...Or, rather, a living room full of them.

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Check out Hamish's and Cynthia's books in the Threat By Example section!