Gordon Woolf's Blog

What is a self-publisher?

(I admit I wrote this 5 years ago, but it is no longer available from the original blog site and I was asked about it this week.)

Why would any self-publisher go around saying they are a self-publisher unless he or she has no intention to ever do more than publish one book and disappear? (And there is nothing inherently wrong with that!)

"Small publisher" includes everything from one book upwards. Surely that single book is just the first book, and if you've found out how to do it and done it successfully, is it not likely that you may then do the same for an even more struggling author?

I'm not even sure I like the term "small publisher" except that it does distinguish us from the big boys in New York who try to rule the world of books and do it so badly. In that sense small publishers include firms employing hundreds of people, firms I'm proud to be numbered among, firms like the publisher Lonely Planet built in this same city by two people who wrote, edited, laid out and hawked their first travel guide and which is now a world-wide employer.

I did it differently -- my business was me alone, working from home, but giving employment to others via contract work, and I was proud to be among other home workers such as the magazine publisher couple I know who turn over more than a million dollars a year from four titles. When I sold my publishing business I had eight current book titles and five authors.

Step one in publishing is to divorce you the author from you the publisher. I don't mean hiding that you are both, but, with all that effort which has to be put into publishing a first book, some of that effort should be put into building a publishing name that can be used in future.

I have sympathy for the reviewers who won't handle "self-published" books. Even if the quality is reasonable, it still says "I don't really know what I'm doing". There is a big difference between self-published and the first book published by a new publisher owned by the author.

My "small publishing" business is still successful. I sold it to one of my authors, Geoffrey Heard, and became one of his. It's web site is still at www.worsleypress.com

In search of funding

Maybe it's a little out of the normal run of production problems, but I had a reader recently point out that one of the major production problems for a small newspaper can be to have the funds to go on producing the paper.

That's a good point. I have come across newspapers that have received arts council and local education grants for things like running an arts page or a page (and sometimes a lot more) for one or more local schools -- especially if they involve the students doing most of the preparation work (I've been paid a few times to go along to schools and explain how a newspaper is put together).

I've also seen schools and other organisations divert funds they used to produce a newsletter to a newspaper which agrees to run a regular column.

However, in general, appeals for "support" don't seem to work in the long term -- much better is to encourage people to show their support by placing paid classifieds whenever they have something to say, something to sell, or someone to thank.

For a local publication, or one which serves a very specialised field where a number of people agree that they would lose substantially (either economically or socially) if the publication ceased, there could be an argument for a "Friends of ..." organisation that maybe gives some benefit such as discounts of some kind that don't cost the publisher anything.

You can also chase local politicians for inclusion on government advertising budgets, though this money seems to be getting much harder to get.

I have to admit that this isn't covered in any great depth in my book How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter although that does cover  much about setting ad rates, selling ads and considering the general economics of publishing.

Rich blacks

I was asked this question a while ago "concerning black color in CMYK printing". The questioner said: "I know that black process color doesn't give you 'real' black from the print, and you have to mix it with others to get darkest possible black. Can you tell me which combination gives the darkest possible black color (extra black) without any 'light' points?"

There's no easy answer to that...

The black you get via CMYK (100%K) is as black as you'll get from just using black ink in any other way (though genuine process black ink is somewhat more transparent than the more normal spot black), but it is true that you get a richer looking black from mixing in a little of the other colours.

The problem comes with small text -- if you have 6 or 8pt text printed in more than one of the CMYK colours and the registration isn't perfect, you'll get a blurred effect that will look far worse than any improvement you'll get from the richer colour.

The compromise for many is to use a small proportion of yellow (say 10%) which won't show up badly if you get a slight yellow edge to the text and to use a small percentage of the background colour.

Another way is to create a "rich black" with a small proportion of say Y and M and apply this only to larger text sizes. The most common combination seems to be 100% K with 20% Magenta to give a warmer black, and maybe 20% Y. Using Cyan instead of Magenta gives a cooler black.

It's also possible to use higher proportions of the other colours, but then you come up against the problem of the total amount of ink you are putting on the paper -- and this will depend on the paper and the press. It can be as low as around 250% for uncoated papers (taking 100% as the equivalent to printing one colour solid). Overprinted black on solid colour need to be watched especially for this danger.

So, it comes again, as with so many such problems, to needing the advice of an experienced press operator, who will have a good idea from experience of what works in specific circumstances.

How to start a publication

I get asked this question every month. The latest was:

I’m in a church that does not have a magazine and they want one. Can I start it? All I have ever produced is a sales newsletter for a firm I work for.

My reply is that I would be surprised if, in a typical organization of a few hundred people, I would be surprised if there are not other people who have had at least as experience as you -- perhaps for a school, business or service group. They may be a starting point and you can share your past experience.

Also look at what is being produced by other organizations -- and it is common for copies of locally produced publications to be sent to local libraries, so the librarian may also be a good contact. And while you may decide that your needs can be served by a home-produced publication, perhaps photocopied, a call at local printing businesses may also produce samples of publications, and an indication of other services, such as someone who can set up templates in a word processor or page layout program and help train in their use.

This kind of enquiry may also help to give some idea of costs, depending on what services have to be paid for and what can be done on a voluntary basis. You also have to make choices on whether a publication can be at least partly financed by advertisements, and how you will obtain editorial: can it be all produced by you and your members, or will you need to seek outside contributions.

Several of the chapters in my book "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" look at various ways of organizing a magazine and at the many levels of production from photocopying or laser printing to digital printing and to the uses of commercial and specialist printers.

Telstra forces a customer to switch

Nick Renton is an author of more than 60 books on taxation, investment, financial planning, public relations, corporate governance, meeting procedure and use of English. He is also a skilled copyeditor. By profession he is an actuary and is often called upon as an arbitrator. He is Member of the Order of Australia (entitled to 'AM' after his name) and was the first president of the Australian Shareholders' Association.

He also has an extensive web site which provides information of all his specialist areas. It is a source referenced by many other sites throughout the world.

However, Nick Renton AM has been forced to move the whole site because the hosts decided they did not want to provide web space for their broadband and dialup customers any more. So, with a couple of months notice, he was told the site will be gone. No, they had no way they could point the old address to a new one.

It serves as a lesson for anyone who has a web site that is not reached by their own domain name. Now, Nick Renton has moved the whole lot to http://nickrenton.com, and while we know the new hosting company, and know they have been around for many years, it cannot be a problem again: the site can be moved to a new host at a few hours' notice with no one who uses the site being aware of any change.

But now comes the surprise: the hosting company that was being used by Nick Renton was not a newcomer from the continuing dotcom revolution. It was Telstra, the first and largest telecommunications company in Australia, which has the lions' share of the Internet business in this country.

So, if you need information such as a guide to all the Latin phrases you are likely to come across, at http://nickrenton.com/310.htm then make a note that it is all now at http://nickrenton.com

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.
 

Reading a print dialog

Can I print a selection of pages? That question came up recently in a discussion and I realised it is not always obvious.

Put simply, a good print dialog which shows a entry longish box named Pages, will usually let you enter non-continguous ranges. If you see two little boxes, labelled From and To, then you are stuck with one range.

In the first case you’ll be able to enter something like":

1-6,8-10,15-

That would mean pages 1 to 8, skip 7, then print 8 to 10, skip pages 11 to 14 and then print from 15 to the end.

There may also be a checkbox to select whether to print blank pages, but be wary that what you think of as blank may not look that way to the computer if there are headers or footers, or even just carriage returns.

Printer options are generally in the driver rather than being a selection from the printer itself, so they may be different between alternate drivers for the same printer -- there are major differences for example between the fit-to-page abilities of my Samsung laser under Windows XP and Windows 7. (It needs more clicks to make a web page fit to a printed page under the newer OS).

Another possibility is to make a PDF of the file since some PDF software, including Acrobat, give an option to  include blank pages, and you can also print by selecting ranges.