Gordon Woolf's Blog

Jack's an artist. That's what we need for the layout

It is a common question: The illustrator for my book is a talented artist, but should I ask him (or her) about doing the book layout?

It may also be suggested with magazine layout: he's a good artist, we should ask him to do our newsletter.

The real question should be to ask whether he has any experience and whether he wants to do the work. Then the publisher, or self-publisher, should ask himself or herself if they have time to cope with problems.

In a recent case the artist was being honest, and would have been prepared to put the time in (at his cost) to find out all the technical information he needed to know. However, there should be at least one person who has the professional knowledge of what makes a good book or magazine layout in the team.

The danger lies in the fact that publication layout and file preparation for printing is detailed, systematic work, and the skills for that are seldom those needed to be an artist and illustrator.

There are a few who manage to combine both skills but they are a minority and deserve every cent they can command. They will, for example, know that the uses of a book cover for thumbnails on the web or in catalogues and ads and possibly for posters as well as for the cover itself, puts severe restrictions on artistic talent.

More common are those designers and layout people who can take other people's illustrations and turn them into good looking and good working covers and pages and produce files which will print without problems. The person who creates good publication files and the illustrator and graphic artist may use much of the same software, but they tend to use it in vastly different ways.

The kind of questions one could ask someone who may be able to do this work could be whether he or she knows the common standards for relative margin widths, on the differences in specifications for different binding methods, and, for example if this includes, as is most likely, an all color cover, the maximum ink levels according to the printing process and paper stock.

He or she may not know the detailed answers but should know what you are talking about (even if you do not). Then (especially if there is time to go elsewhere if necessary), by all means give him or her a go.

Make sure you get paid on time

Being successful in a small business is not just reliant on making a profit on whatever you sell, whether it is goods or services. It relies also, and perhaps more importantly on getting paid for those goods or services.

I was surprised yet again this month to come across a small business owner, in this case a freelance designer, who had not thought to set out clearly just when he expected to get paid and ensuring that was understood by his clients.

He wondered whether he should offer a discount for payment at 10 days or 30 days. That, I suggested, would just mean he would be giving a discount to his current prompt payers and encouraging others by suggesting he was prepared to finance their debts to the extent of 30 days which could be attractive compared to bank overdraft costs. He also needed to make sure that he got invoices out immediately a job was done, and certainly not wait until the end of the month (and sometimes into the next month) as he had been doing.

Long ago I established a simple system with my clients: no job would be started until the previous one had been paid for. I did have a couple of exceptions for weekly jobs but on those there was a date for payment each month which I had got from the client and no future job would be started if that date went past without payment.

When you have your own debts it may seem hard to seemingly pass up the chance of more work, but if you are offering fair value in what you do you will find that clients will keep to agreed terms when it is in their interest. Those who do not may not be worth working for; it is no good doing work for which you will never be paid, or paid so slowly that extra costs in chasing payment eat away at all the profit and do not return your own expenses in doing the job.

Part payment should be normal in advance on first orders. In my experience as a publisher, most book printers now work on half payment in advance and the rest before the finished job is despatched. One large printer told me recently that is what saved them in the recent global difficulties.

Faced with such payment terms from printers I can understand that some publishers will be trying to delay payments to other suppliers ... will you be one of those?

Adobe v Apple: It's happened before

On the AppleInsider blog, Daniel Eran Dilger gives the background to the current Flash war with the comment "This all happened before".

His story and timeline of PostScript, the Laserwriter, TrueType, Aldus PageMaker, Macromedia's Freehand is almost all as I recall it and heard at the time from mainly Adobe insiders. The only statement I see which is a bit questionable is his assertion that Adobe did not realise when buying Aldus that the rights to Freehand did not come with the sale since they still belonged to the originators. Not until they bought Macromedia 10 years later did Freehand enter Adobe's fold.

However, if you think that lack of foresight (or what is now called "due dilligence" is impossible I can quote a tale from Australian media history. Our main TV weekly program guide which once sold a million copies a week was part of a publishing company sold off by News Ltd (which many years previously had been in the free-to-air TV business here) and ultimately sold to one of our major TV channels. After the final sale, the other leading TV company "revealed" that they owned 50% of the title. Within a week the magazine was being published by that company's publishing arm, from another city, with an entirely new staff.

Quite a blow for the other TV channel -- but I worked for that magazine several years earlier and as a fairly junior player I knew that the magazine was only half owned by the company publishing it. So I question how the money/management people did not know that essential fact when talking of multi-million deals. Could Adobe have not known about Freehand in 1994? Maybe.

It does not seem long ago that there were continuing email list discussions on the relative merits of true PostScript and the clones built in to printers. It dawned on most of us very slowly that the future lay in postscript interpreters resident on the computer, so slowly for me that the PostScript 2 laser printer I paid $5000 for (and $500 for each cartridge) we were unable to give away. It recently ended at the tip despite still being in working order.

The column is at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on_flash_reminiscent_of_postscript_struggle.html&page=1

Open letter to a publisher thinking of switching to online

Yet another magazine sent me a notification that it was going online. This time it was to be just a trial, but here is a slightly edited version of my reply:

While I can understand the desire of publishers to change to online provision of magazines, I would suggest that this is not as much in a reader’s interest. It is largely a transfer of costs from publisher to reader rather than a true saving in costs (and therefore in resources).

For example, I have a 10GB monthly download limit and while I usually stay within that, it means that on the occasions when I might not, it is quite likely that a magazine file will have to wait until the new month or be ignored altogether. My minimum cost to add an extra couple of GB of download is a one-off $20 payment or, alternatively, to increase by $10 every month to go to a higher limit which may not be used.

If I wish to show something to my wife or look at it more closely it means printing it out which again increases costs at my end, and though I’d often choose to print on my relatively ancient laser printer at a few cents a page, it might have coloured content that makes it more likely that I’d print on my inkjet at perhaps a dollar or more a time for a 2- or 3-page article.

The print edition will also normally be passed on to someone at the local computer club or U3A or community house (or even the local branch of the Australian Shareholders Association  (though that I no longer attend with any frequency). At any of those it may well attract further interest and possibly subscribers before being recycled (at least I can hope it is recycled). The online edition, if downloaded, will consume electricity and broadband fees before being deleted, i.e. gone for ever. Online for you it will continue to cost storage fees.

I can see a lot of sense in making some content available only online, especially the tables which have to be printed in such small type that they cannot be read by most people with my aged eyes. News too may be better online but most articles tend to be scanned much more quickly on screen than in print...and therefore not read as thoroughly.

So, unless you plan to also reduce article lengths and their number and interest, I’d suggest that at the very least you investigate a thinner, more cheaply printed edition with web links, preferably in a short form or linking to an index page online for more information.

I note your comments that the online version is just a trial but it does take several seconds to go from low to high resolution on a page and I note that links within pages are not live.

Lastly, it is a Flash file and I presume you have noted that the iPad does not accept Flash files and does seem to be the only real eReader suitable for viewing online magazines, at least until we see HP’s contender.