Tag: self-publishing

Laying Out A Book Isn’t As Easy As You’d Think

~ James Viscosi ~ 8 Comments

So I got the printed version of my first stab at a Lulu book and, as a book, it looks surprisingly good — quality binding, nice solid feel to the cover, good weight to the pages, dark and legible text inside. The problem is, the interior looks like one of the manuscripts that I print out when I’m editing. It quite frankly didn’t occur to me that I would need to:

  1. Change the font from courier to something reader-friendly
  2. Add the page numbering and book title in the header and footer
  3. Replace underlining with italics
  4. Insert the sort of pages you typically find at the beginning and end of a book — you know, a little blurb, a title page, a copyright page.
  5. Turn off double spacing, for crying out loud … jeez, what am I, a moron?

Also, the margins are too close to the inner binding, but that’s not on the list of things that didn’t occur to me, because it did. I just didn’t make them big enough. I’m correcting all these things and getting ready to try Lulu Book Revision 2. I expect this one to look nicer, but there will probably be a couple more iterations before it’s ready to go.

For anyone who’s waiting with bated breath for this to be ready (i.e., no one), I’ll drop you a teensy tidbit … it’s a vampire novel set in the mid or late 90s. It was actually written in the early 90s, but later updated to account for the newfound popularity of cell phones. (I am not, however, going to be updating it to account for wireless Internet, camera phones, etc. I have to draw the line somewhere.)

That First Step Is A Lulu

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So seeing as the mainstream publishing world has never quite known what to do with me — I have a portfolio of rejection letters eight inches thick full of comments like “highly enjoyable but we have no idea how to market it” and “skillfully written, but not everyone wants to read The Books of Blood by Clive Barker” (I used to get compared to Mr. Barker fairly regularly) — I’ve decided to bypass them and start publishing books myself, with the first one being that old standby, the vampire novel, coming soon via Lulu. Watch for Long Before Dawn to be available in the next few weeks.

I’ve set up a small homepage at Lulu which for now will serve as my main writing, media, and publishing-related site, although I’ll likely continue to cross-post material here … assuming Dennis lets me sit at the keyboard every now and then.