Tips for first-time self-publishers

Do you have a budget for your project? If you do, the following tips may help control your costs.

Design:

Although it is tempting to "see what the designer will come up with," you will spend additional money if your designer is "working blind". A better approach is to have some ideas about what you'd like your project to look like, and to share that information with your designer. The more clearly you and the designer communicate, the more money you will save in production time.

If you have examples of book covers or of book interior pages that reflect your taste, give the designer a few of those pages. You may email those pages as jpeg-format scans, or fax the pages, or (if the book is being sold online) you may email its url (i.e., Amazon.com), full title, author, and page numbers of sample pages.

The designer will not copy the sample styles exactly, instead, the visual samples help communicate what the author has in mind so that design-approval will proceed more efficiently.

Images:

For a cover image, you may either provide an image you already own, or, you or your designer may purchase an image from an online stock image source. Some stock image sites offer images at very low cost (about $10 for a high res image for a book of about 6" x 9"). Because image "research" time is billable time, if the image search is a task you are comfortable taking on, you can save that cost. If you find images you like but you aren't sure if they will be suitable, send the image stock-house name and the image reference numbers for the designer's review before any purchases are made.

Most books also have a color portrait of the author on the back cover, along with a brief bio. Images for your book cover must be high resolution (300 ppi, at the size they will be printed, or larger). Although some images that are of lower quality can be improved and used, lower quality images need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Some images are too poor to be effective in print.

Images in the interior of the book will be printed in grayscale, unless you plan to print a full-color interior, or have made arrangements with your print vendor for some certain pages to print in color.

Manuscript:

Before going into production, your manuscript should be completely edited. That means, spell-checked, printed on paper, and read by someone whom you trust to be able to correct any grammatical mistakes that you may have not caught yourself. Although edits can be made after the book is in its final page form, those edits will cost extra time and money. And although it's quite difficult to catch every single error, the fewer errors that show up after the book is in page form, the better.

Finding a Suitable Print Vendor:

My final products are high-resolution pdf files, that are ftp'd, or burned to CD and mailed to your print vendor. The files are customized to the specifications of the particular print vendor that you have chosen. I do not include printing in my services because of insurance costs.

The major concerns in choosing a print vendor:
• Price
• Customer service
• Print quality

Caveat emptor. Although you may find print vendors with very low prices, always look at and physically handle their wares before choosing them (even if that means buying a book from them). Some printers also cut corners by eliminating customer service — choose them at your own risk. (I've had clients who have had to reprint elsewhere after a bad experience with a low-price vendor— I am no longer comfortable sending files to those vendors.) If a print vendor's site is aimed only at first-time authors working in Word, and that site does not easily accomodate professional designers, beware! Quality may be compromised.

Instead, I recommend using a printer with a good product, good customer service, and who also has reasonable pricing. There are good quality print vendors out there. I've had very good luck with FidlarDoubleday.com in the past, for short to medium book quantities.

Pricing:

I prefer to bill by the hour, and I can give a rough estimate of the amount of time your book should take to complete. Plain-text books, such as most novels, are the quickest to produce. Books that include tables, graphs, charts, many lists, fill-in-the-blanks, many captioned images, etc., require some additional time to build. Therefore, I like to have manuscript file(s) in hand before giving estimates.

I will qualify my estimate by stating a given number of proof stages with estimated revision time in hours; any overages will be additional. If you would prefer a proposal with a firm price, I can provide that instead.

Please contact me with a brief description of your project and we can begin communication.

Thank you.

email Pat@PatriciaRasch.com