By Hamish MacDonald
Back in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. It's all good news for us independent publishers.
The original article was called "DIY Book Production." Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I've had to learn and acquire in order to do that.
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Generally, self-publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you're willing to do, the more money you can save; the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it'll cost you.
Self-pub: Four times more options than in 2000.
When I self-published my first novel, doubleZero, in 1999, I wanted to create a book to sell in stores. A big folded-over photocopy sandwich didn't appeal to me, but I really didn't know how else one could make a book, so I laid out the pages and the cover, then paid Coach House Press to do the production work.
There may have been other ways to do it, but having written a book about Y2K, I didn't have the time to find out. Now, though, there are four main options available:
- Offset printing
- Print-on-Demand
- Hand-bound hardcovers
- Perfect binding
Here's a summary of each (with special emphasis on the ones I like!):
Offset printing.
Offset printing is a high-volume printing method that uses large machinery to transfer text and images from metal plates to rubber pads then finally to paper. Coach House Press is a sterling example of a traditional press who care about their work. Their price was also the best I found — cheaper by $1,500 at the time than any print bureau.
Cynthia pipes in: 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.
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.
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.
Pro: |
- You get a lot of books.
- A large run of books is not much more expensive than a short run.
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Con: |
- You get a lot of books.
- Expensive. In 1999, I paid $3,000 for a run of 500 books.
- Because of the mechanical set-up costs, a short run of books is practically as expensive as a long run. You probably don't want thousands of books. Even 500 is an awful lot to move.
- It's a one-shot deal.
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What you need:
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A completed manuscript on disk, formatted the way you want it to appear in the book (or "typeset"). |
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A finished cover design on disk. |
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Cash. |
Print-on-Demand.
Newer digital printers don't need to be mechanically adjusted to switch between jobs, so PoD publishers can print copies of work as needed.
I'm fussy about how my work looks, and the one PoD service I looked into seriously (the reputable CafePress) involves turning your pages into funny-sized PDF files and uploading them to the invisible maw of a webpage. I'm generally comfortable with Internet anything — online banking, making purchases, auctions — but I'm used to revising and reviewing and revising and reviewing until I like what I've created; I didn't feel confident about what I might get from this method and took it no further. So my discussion of Print-on-Demand ends here.
Pro: |
- Less expensive than traditional printing.
- No stockpile of unsold books.
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Con: |
- Bookstores won't carry them. Each has to be ordered at a retail price, which stores won't pay. Stores also can't return them if they don't sell, which is the practice they're accustomed to.
- The price per book to you, the author/publisher, is often close to the retail price.
- The cover templates they offer are often yeechy.
- Some PoD shops promise and charge for marketing and promotion they have no intention of delivering (listing you in a vast catalogue, for instance, does not count as promotion). The way these businesses pitch themselves plays on the emotions of frustrated yet ambitious authors. For a more thorough discussion about PoD, read Jeff Yamaguchi's "Print Non-Demand".
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What you need:
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A completed, typeset manuscript on file to upload. You may need to have it in PDF format, which I'll talk about in the "Software" section below. |
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A finished cover design (unless you choose one of the publisher's designs, which is usually cheaper). |
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Cash. |
Ultimately I'm happy I didn't go this route, because instead of tying my work into a company's PoD service I learned the following two methods, which have been a fun breakthrough in my career.
Hand-bound hardcovers.
It's easier than you might think to create a hardcover book of your work. There are endless fun ways to adapt the handmade book process, too: For Christmas 2005 I made all my own presents — journals, photo albums, even a pop-up stage with a wee cartoon actress for a friend of mine who's in the theatre. These were a real hit. (Don't ask me what I'm doing next year to top it!)
Pro: |
- Complete autonomy: You can do it all yourself and retain complete control.
- Easy start-up.
- Can be done with common materials.
- Produces a result that's personally satisfying and has a quality feel to it (a hardcover book!).
- Easily adaptable to a wide variety of creative projects.
- Hand-made work occupies a premium space in people's minds if it's done well.
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Con: |
- A time-consuming process.
- Stitching can be tricky at first.
- Longer books involve some unwieldy sewing.
- Difficult to put your title and name on the cover (block printing, silkscreen, and Japanese Gocco printmaking kits are some options, but I haven't tried them).
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There are good explanations of the process here:
DIY Planner - Bookbinding
Toby Craig's book assembling photojournal
To be honest, though, it took me a while to get the hang of "saddle-stitching" pages together. I found it hard to follow even the best of diagrams. I finally got it when I read Peter and Donna Thomas's excellent Making Books by Hand.
Now that I have the hang of it, it's actually fun, almost therapeutic, to sit and stitch a book together. Producing a novel this way, though, is not so much fun. Where my wee book of short stories or a journal contains ten or twelve "signatures" — sewn-together groups of pages — my third novel makes up twenty-six signatures. That's a very, very long thread, and a lot of bits of folded-up paper to keep organized while sewing them together.
Here's how to do it yourself:
For these next two sections, I'm going to divide the materials section into two options: "Minimum" and "Press". The minimum requirements will allow you to get started and learn without much initial investment, if any (depending on how much craftsy material you've got lying around the house). The "Press" materials are in case you decide, as I did, that you wanted to produce store-quality books at home, without having to go out and pay for commercial print shop services anymore.
What you need:
Minimum |
Press |
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A completed, typeset manuscript printed out. |
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A finished cover design. |
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A sharp blade and ruler. |
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A rotary-blade guillotine. Your pages will be much more even using one of these. |
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Hard paper board for the covers. I was using matting board like you'd get from a framing shop until I found large grey boards in an art shop that cost a fraction of the price.
Bookbinding board is available, but the board will never be seen, so it doesn't need to be fancy. I've tried corrugated cardboard, but it's too puffy; it doesn't feel like a proper hardcover.
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An awl for punching small holes in your pages. Or you can also sink a needle into a piece of dowelling. |
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I use a model-maker's drill, which is like a watch screwdriver with a 1mm drill bit, and drill through all the pages before folding them. You can also get eggbeater-like hand-drills that will accept a small bit, but I found this harder to control and snapped several bits. |
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Heavy thread. You can run it across beeswax to make it easier to work with and less likely to tangle. |
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Paper. Regular copy paper will do, or you can use an ivory stock for an antiquey look. |
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Heavy paper or paper-backed cloth for wrapping around your cover. Ordinary cloth can work but lets the glue leak through, which looks spermy. |
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PVA Glue.
I thought this must be something special when I bought it from a paperie, then discovered is the same old stuff that we peeled off our hands as kids. |
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A bone folder. This helps you make sharp creases in your pages. More and more art supply shops have bookbinding materials like these. |
How I do it:
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Print out the book. (More on this in the "Software" section below.) |
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Cut the pages in half (I prefer to make smallish books). |
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Fold the top sheet in half to see where the spine is, secure all the sheets together with bulldog clips, then drill four holes along the spine of the pages.
If it's a really thick stack, I break it into smaller chunks, because the drill can go off at an angle or not get all the way through.
You can also just use an awl to punch holes through your pages. Make one mock-up page as your hole guide and use it on smaller groups of pages. |
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Fold the pages with your finger, or bone folder. |
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Group the folded pages into stacks of pages, no more than five or six pages per stack. |
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If you look at any hardcover book in your house closely, you'll probably find that it's made up of folded-over groups of pages like this. These are "signatures".
If all the pages were just stacked and folded over, they'd bulge out in a U-shape on the right-hand side. Using smaller groups of pages, or signatures, prevents this. |
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Sew the first signature:
- in the first hole,
- out the second hole,
- in the third hole,
- out the fourth hole.
This makes Signature One. |
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Sew the second signature so it's joined to the first:
- into the first hole of Signature Two,
- out the second hole of Signature Two,
- back into the second hole of Signature One,
- out the third hole of Signature One,
- back into the third hole of Signature Two,
- out the fourth hole of Signature Two...
...And so on. (This is the bit that takes practice and is difficult to describe. Others do a better job; see the resources above.) |
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Once all the signatures are stitched, tie the two ends of the thread together, clamp the pages between two hard pieces of board with the spine sticking out, and glue the spine fairly heavily with glue. Leave this clamped together and put it aside to dry. |
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Cut two pieces of board, each the same size as one of your folded pages, and cut a third board just smaller than the spine-width of your sewn-together signatures (which now make up a "book block").
Cut a piece of cover cloth or paper a little bit larger than the size of these boards, allowing some gutter-room between the boards since your cover will need to hinge open and closed easily. |
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Cut a small bit off the four corners diagonally so they won't bunch up when folded, brush glue on the inside edge, and tuck them in, pressing down so they stay flat. |
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Cut two pieces of decorative paper the same size as your book's pages and fold them with their fancy side facing inward. When your book block has dried, put a small amount of glue on either end and glue these "end papers" to the block. |
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Smear glue on the inside of your cover and stick the outsides of your end papers to the cover. Close the book and clamp it between boards or put it under something heavy, and leave it to dry overnight. When it's dry, open your book, separate the edges of any pages that are stuck together, and sign it! |
Here's how my books look in hardcover:
Perfect binding.
This is ultimately the same technique that any press uses to make a paperback book. It didn't occur to me until recently that I could do this, too.
Pro: |
- You can, with some practice, produce a result that's just like what people are used to seeing in stores.
- You are completely autonomous.
- It's fast.
- The materials used in each individual book are inexpensive (card stock, regular paper).
- It's not a one-off: Money you spend setting this up gives you the ability to do this over and over, as opposed to paying for the run of just one book.
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Con: |
- Set-up can be expensive (if you go the route I have; it doesn't have to be).
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After years of trying to go the traditional publishing route, I wanted to jump back into the indie game and recapture the fun and proud spirit of producing my own work. Making 400-page novels using the hardcover method is so time-consuming, though, that I couldn't reasonably charge a cover-price equal to the time spent making each one. And I want to make it easy for someone who might be curious to buy my books.
My mum stumbled across a site called Gigabooks.net, started as a project by a man named Chet Novicki, who found himself giving self-publishing advice to so many friends that he decided to make equipment and handbooks to help others self-publish. I'm wary of anything online that targets aspiring authors, but this guy is giving good information and selling quality gear. I bought a hand-binding press from him, which wasn't cheap, especially when you add duty to it, but it's been just the greatest boost to my self-publishing efforts.
Of course, you could make one of these yourself — or in theory, one could. I can't, though; I haven't got the tools or materials to do it.
Copyshop versus ownership.
From Jim: 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.
As I mentioned before, I paid $3,000 in 1999 to have my first book printed by an offset press. I'm sure it costs more now. I've blown a fair amount of money in the past few months setting up a press at home, filling up my bedroom with all manner of strange equipment. But even after having bought all the "Press"-level of gear and having the capacity to do this all myself for any book I want to print, I've still spent about a grand less than what the print run of a single book cost (and that book is now topically out-of-date).
What you need:
How I do it:
Perfect-bound copies of my books:
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.
For detailed instructions for perfect binding, you can also visit Chet Novicki's site at Gigabooks.net. He's very generous when it comes to answering questions about the process.
Software for designing and printing the pages of your book.
In my first version of this article, I said that you had to have access to the (very expensive) program QuarkXPress to do the typesetting of your book's inside pages. I was wrong. I was working as a graphic designer at the time, so that's what I was accustomed to using. Now, though, I'm a copywriter, and I have seen the scope of today's word processing programs. You can do just as much to lay out your text, and more easily, in programs like:
Justification and footers.
Most books have their text "justified", meaning that it's balanced from left to right so that both margins are square. I tried to do that in Word recently and learned that the program is very bad at it. If there are only two words on a line, you end up with something that looks...
Badness! So if you're using Word, use the left justified option (straight along the left side and "ragged right"). I believe that TextMaker handles this much better.
Also, make sure to put page numbers at the bottom of your pages. This will help immensely when you're printing and arranging them. It was really fiddly work to set it up, but I think it was worth the trouble to create separate "sections" in my books so I could just have page numbering on the story pages and not on the title page or the "About the Author" page. (In Word this is found in "Insert/Break/Section break types/Next page", then mucking about the options in "View/Header and footer" until you get the proper pages to number themselves.)
An imposing program.
One of the big stumbling-blocks for the self-publisher until recently was a task called imposition. If you take a look at the sheets of paper that make up a book, you'll see that what's printed on them is actually jumbled up so that when the sheets are folded together they make one continuous book. Back when I did doubleZero, the QuarkXPress extensions to do this cost a thousand dollars or more.
Since then, a company called Blue Squirrel has developed a program called ClickBook ($49.95), which will intercept any job you can send to the printer and rearrange it into books, booklets, posters, and all sorts of other formats. I can't say enough good things about this program, because it makes something possible from home that just wasn't before, and it makes it straightforward. (The math of working out imposition makes my head spin.)
ClickBook can now also save your whole job as a PDF file. Normally you have to be very careful about bringing all the fonts and images you've used along with your file if you're going to use a print service. Nothing's worse than seeing your favourite typeface disappear and be replaced by a system font! (Okay, perhaps trade injustice is a bit worse.)
If you're concerned about this but won't be using ClickBook, you can use the freeware program PrimoPDF on Windows to 'print' to portable files that will look exactly the same on any computer, and on the Mac (OS X) you can choose to "Save as PDF" from the Print dialogue box.
About duplexing.
ClickBook works by dividing up the pages into smaller pages and laying several of those out on a single piece of paper. You'll also need to run the pages through the printer again to print the back of them; this is called duplexing. My first laser printer wasn't designed for duplexing, so it smudged the sheets the second time they went through, and it often mangled a page, which is really frustrating and wasteful when it's just one of sixty sheets of paper you've already printed one side of. So look for a printer that has duplexing as a feature.
Creating your cover.
When someone picks up your book, yup, it's Judgement Day. Err on the side of simplicity when designing your cover. Not too many fonts, no garish colours unless you're really confident that you're making a deliberate choice others will also appreciate, and make absolutely sure that the images you've created or adapted for your cover are not only ones you have the right to use, but are also at a high enough resolution for print. What works on a web page will look like some blocky thing from Super Mario World if you send it through a proper printer. Your images should be more than 200 dots per inch (dpi). And, sorry, you can't just up the numbers in Photoshop; they have to start at a high resolution.
Think about teaming up with a designer whose work you like. See if there's anything you can do for them, and set up a clear agreement with them: How many revisions are they willing to make? Get samples of books you like or images that convey what you're after. The more you give your designer, the more in-tune their work will be with your feeling of the book.
Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop are the leading graphics packages. They cost lots. There's an open-source alternative called Gimp, which I really want to support and use, but like so much opensourceware it seems painfully complicated. Or else I'm just stuck in thinking modes patterned by the commercial products. There's also a new program called Paint.NET, produced jointly by students at Washington State University and Microsoft.
ISBN and UPC: Making your book easier to sell.
The International Standard Book Number is a unique identifier assigned to books. Getting your own ISBN helps bookstores keep track of your book. It also feels damned cool when you get it, 'cause it means you've produced an officially real book!
When I made doubleZero, I was still living in Canada, and got wonderful help from the National Library of Canada. It was years ago, but if it's a typical government department, the same staff might still be there until the end of time. In this case, you'd be lucky, 'cause they were great to deal with. They can set you up with your own run of ISBN numbers and provide you with the Cataloguing-in-Publication data to put on the inside cover. In exchange, they'll request two copies of your book for the National Library of Canada archives, which is actually kinda cool to imagine (though it did make me think of that scene in the giant warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
You can reach them here.
I live in Scotland now, so it didn't seem right to use the library's services this time. I was also working on my cover layouts on the weekend and wanted to get my ISBNs instantly, so I went searching and found this site, where I bought mine. ($55 for one, $47 each for two, $44 for three, and so on.)
Once you have your ISBN, you can get a barcode to include on the back cover of your book. Lorie La Fata wrote in response to my original article with a helpful link to a website that will generate a barcode (or UPC symbol) for you. You can reach it here. (Many publishing services would charge you for the production of this graphic.)
A word on copyright.
Some people are so concerned about protecting their unique story ideas (even though there may only be six stories) that they liberally sprinkle the "©" symbol throughout their documents. In publishing, this is generally considered the mark of an amateur, because it insults the professionalism or ethics of whomever you've decided to share your work with. One copyright mark at the beginning of the book is sufficient.
How do you register your copyright? You don't need to. The moment you create an original work, you hold the copyright to it. If you really feel paranoid, you can mail a copy to yourself or someone else and keep it sealed. The post-mark will officially place your work at a point in time.
In lieu of copyright, you might consider protecting your work with a Creative Commons license. It promotes a fairer, more modern approach to intellectual and creative property by allowing people to use and share your work according to your wishes, not the dictates of a publishing, recording, or movie corporation. When you go to the Creative Commons website, you can choose from a menu of allowable uses for your work, which will then be rolled into a license that you can include inside your book.
Freedom is yours.
More and more people are becoming frustrated with the traditional publishing industry. Getting out of that corporatised voodoo and back into self-publishing has made me excited about being an author again, given me the engaging and rewarding craft of bookbinding to play with, and opened the floodgates of my imagination: I'm not concerning myself with being "publishable" anymore, I'm getting on with being the author I am.
Now when people ask me "Are you published?" I don't get huffy and whinge about "the state of the publishing industry." I smile and say "Actually, I publish my own work. By hand."
You can, too.
Hamish MacDonald is a novelist and copywriter who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of doubleZero, The Willies, and Idea in Stone. You can read his stories, download free e-books of his novels, and follow his blog at hamishmacdonald.com.
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How To Listen/Play
My pal Scott lent me his copy of The Winking Circle, a DVD made by some kids in small-town Ontario that documents their attempts to "eccentrify their lives." More than anything else I've seen, it reflects the essence of the cut-n-paste photocopied zines -- it's an hour long piece that masterfully mixes the visual eye-candy of skateboard stunts and crazy haircuts and artbikes with stirring music and non-idealogical philosophy. It's spectacle reclaimed, really: spectacle given a soul.
But out of curiosity he googled the ad firm who'd made the commercial and oddly enough it was a Toronto company who did it. So he brought the situation to the attention of a hotshot law firm, and they agreed to take on the case: and it was strong enough that they took it on for free.
My series of short movies about videogames is being screened together for the first time as part of a really fun event on Saturday April 8th in Toronto. It's put on by the dorkArmy crew at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street W., 7:30pm, $5) -- come for the vids, stay for the Drunken Dance Dance Revolution & karaoke! There's also a screening at the Blim Art Gallery in Vancouver on Monday May 8th. I'll be going to both and really looking forward to them -- as well as six videos I've released on the site and elsewhere, there's a brand new minidocumentary piece about two indie game makers. Click through to see one of the series, "Mark Slutsky Reviews the Nintendo DS."]]>
For those of you who're still in an Oscar mood, Susan and I made this fake movie preview that asks: what if the plucky heroine from Million Dollar Baby was into the Dance Dance Revolution videogame instead of boxing?
It's a rare time that I like an art show so much that I'll buy a catalogue -- I find the writing in them does nothing for me. They're as bad as artist's statements, usually, which (along with the obligatory reading for authors) I consider to be a cultural convention that is deeply broken. But despite the fact that A Beginner's Guide to Quantal Strife is a catalogue for a show that I hadn't even seen yet, I read it cover to cover. It's a thought-provoking and breezy read.
Distribution is one of the toughest nuts to crack when it comes to publishing. There's a few reasons for this, one of which is that it's boring. It's hard to get excited about receivables, warehousing, and invoices. But good distribution has made it possible for me to make a living off my books.
There are very few small book distributors, and those that exist tend to be specialist. 
Anna
carries the following things with her: 
Amelia
carries with her: 
I've come to realize that I don't hate advertising so much as have an allergic reaction to a high-hype-to-low-content ratio: like when the inner ear is imbalanced, when marketing TALKS LOUD and SAYS NOTHING NEW it induces what I call hype nausea. So promoting my books was initially a challenge for me. But since I wrote my first DIY Book Promo article five years ago, I've brought public attention to three more novels and now quite enjoy it. Here's some of the things I think about when I craft a promotional campaign.]]>
GENERAL PHILOSOPHY
There's really no need to add another dull reading to the pile. Especially when you're starting out, people aren't fixated on hearing a certain passage from your books: in fact, they probably don't care if you read at all. Show a slide show of photos from the country that inspired the setting of the book, or do covers of the songs that your main character sings. People come to get a sense of your personality, and what you're like in person. The majority of readings are boring, for lots of reasons, one of which is simply technical: it's confusing for the listeners to shift between dialogue and exposition, it's easy to get lost and zone out. 
I met Missy Kulik at an indie media conference where I was doing a DIY Books seminar. I picked up a couple of her comics and we've kept in touch ever since. Her first book, Personal Charm, was self-published in June: or as the copyright page more originally puts it, "First Pressing June 2005." We chatted by email about her book, which has its roots in ten years of zine making. ]]>
I like how you mention not only when something happened, but how much time has passed before you drew it. Can you talk about the process there? Do you make notes?
