I've been thinking about making a print version of my ebook, so I started researching how to make a quality self-published product in print. Many articles I have read state that Word is terrible to use for typesetting, and if you want your book to look professional, you need to typeset it to fine control spacing, hyphenation, fonts, and other things not suited to word processors. I lack the funds to send my book to a professional typesetter. I will need to pretend to be one, so I googled "open source typesetting".
I looked at LeTex, but was intimidated by its complexity. The documentation assumes you already know a lot about typesetting.
I've just fired up Scribus, so far it seems friendlier.
For those of you who do your own typesetting, what do you use? Where should I best spend my time learning?
Typesetting
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moderntimes
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My books are all professionally published, so my publisher does all the setup, but yeah, you can't use Word.
I think that "CreateSpace" is the usual tool used. I think it's owned by Amazon. You can do it yourself or get someone to do it for you at a very modest cost.
In other words, you can send them the MS-Word file and they'll format it properly for print -- full justification, title page, front & back matter.
For those who don't know about publishing, the terms "front matter" and "back matter" are very specific terms which you MUST use if you're talking with someone about setting up a book for print (or for very pro-looking e-book format too). The term "Front Matter" is everything in a book, other than the cover, which comes before the book text actually starts. This is the 1- title page, 2- copyright page, 3- acknowledgments page, 4- quotes from those who praise your book, 5- epigraph if any, 6- other legal junk or notices or whatever. The term "Back Matter" is of course anything except the cover which comes after "The End". This can be a bio of the author, maybe a teaser chapter from the next book in the series, that sort of stuff.
Anyone who want to, google "book front matter and back matter" and you can get a complete description.
ANY newbie author needs to prepare these things in addition to the actual book's text: 1- Front matter, 2- Back matter, 3- Front cover art suggestions, 4- back cover suggestions. Back cover usually has a brief synopsis of the book and maybe one really good early review quote about the book.
If you're doing the publishing yourself, you can check out "CreateSpace" and see what's up. I think it's got all the tools needed. And you can pay a small fee and get this done on your behalf. All you need to do is supply the needed text.
As far as a book cover, I think you can do one of these: 1- Get a friend to do the cover or do it yourself, and lay out the image nicely. 2- Purchase a cover art image and layout via CreateSpace -- I think they've got a big stock of cover art to choose from, 3- use an artist image which is in public domain, like Rembrandt.
For me, since my books are being professionally published by a non-subsidy firm (they pay me) I sent my suggestions to them for the type of cover art I wanted, and one of their staff / contract artists did a fine job on the covers. I also sent them all the necessary front & back matter. They of course provided the copyright page while I provided the rest. They of course did all the pro setup and printing, and put the books on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.
Pick up any professional book and you will quickly see what front & back matter are. And a table of contents and index are also front / back matter but rarely used in fiction.
Hope this helps.
I think that "CreateSpace" is the usual tool used. I think it's owned by Amazon. You can do it yourself or get someone to do it for you at a very modest cost.
In other words, you can send them the MS-Word file and they'll format it properly for print -- full justification, title page, front & back matter.
For those who don't know about publishing, the terms "front matter" and "back matter" are very specific terms which you MUST use if you're talking with someone about setting up a book for print (or for very pro-looking e-book format too). The term "Front Matter" is everything in a book, other than the cover, which comes before the book text actually starts. This is the 1- title page, 2- copyright page, 3- acknowledgments page, 4- quotes from those who praise your book, 5- epigraph if any, 6- other legal junk or notices or whatever. The term "Back Matter" is of course anything except the cover which comes after "The End". This can be a bio of the author, maybe a teaser chapter from the next book in the series, that sort of stuff.
Anyone who want to, google "book front matter and back matter" and you can get a complete description.
ANY newbie author needs to prepare these things in addition to the actual book's text: 1- Front matter, 2- Back matter, 3- Front cover art suggestions, 4- back cover suggestions. Back cover usually has a brief synopsis of the book and maybe one really good early review quote about the book.
If you're doing the publishing yourself, you can check out "CreateSpace" and see what's up. I think it's got all the tools needed. And you can pay a small fee and get this done on your behalf. All you need to do is supply the needed text.
As far as a book cover, I think you can do one of these: 1- Get a friend to do the cover or do it yourself, and lay out the image nicely. 2- Purchase a cover art image and layout via CreateSpace -- I think they've got a big stock of cover art to choose from, 3- use an artist image which is in public domain, like Rembrandt.
For me, since my books are being professionally published by a non-subsidy firm (they pay me) I sent my suggestions to them for the type of cover art I wanted, and one of their staff / contract artists did a fine job on the covers. I also sent them all the necessary front & back matter. They of course provided the copyright page while I provided the rest. They of course did all the pro setup and printing, and put the books on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.
Pick up any professional book and you will quickly see what front & back matter are. And a table of contents and index are also front / back matter but rarely used in fiction.
Hope this helps.
"Ineluctable modality of the visible..."
