January 15, 2006

The aunt and uncle factor …

Everything is relative :p As those reading these pages would know, I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing my book through Lulu or some other PoD (Print on Demand) outfit. After debating on this for weeks with myself, I finally decided to move on to the next step with Lulu – the one after creating a free account (and sitting on it for weeks :p) I decided to actually upload my book to Lulu and get moving on the publishing process.

This was where the relative factor came in. I had completed the final manuscript of my book according to publisher’s guidelines – it was formatted with the right margins, had the correct line spacing and had one of the approved fonts and font sizes. So, I had been thinking of my book as being 375 pages (or thereabouts). Then, Lulu says that I need to use their manuscript template to format the book and so I’m like, "OK, fine. Let’s do that!" It takes a while to get everything into the Lulu template (they provide a blank Word document which is formatted the way they want) but once I got everything set, I realize that my book had mysteriously shrunk down to 197 pages :p

I then get started on the actual process of setting everything up for publishing and making sure that the page layout is correct on the new document. One of the first things I did was remove the chapter breaks :p I had originally written the novel as an assortment of scenes and did not want them to be broken up into chapters. However, in converting over from my own editor (Aamanuensis) to Word for easier formatting, the scenes became chapters. I now decided to take the chapter breaks out and simply have scene separators. This ended up in further reducing the number of pages and the actual book now stands at less than 180 pages!

I had done all of my price calculations and comparisons of different PoD companies based on a page count of about 370 and now I find that I have a book which is half that size :p Looks as if I might have to put Lulu on the shelf for a bit and go out and check the PoD company price breakdowns again, factoring in the new page count :p

Tags: ,
Posted by Fahim at 7:40 am  |  No Comments