Self-publishing Unholy Quest

Self-publishing Unholy Quest
by John J. Enright

Trying to get a book published through traditional publishers can sometimes be pure frustration. That was certainly my experience trying to get my novel, Unholy Quest, published. The standard advice with fiction is to first try to get an agent, because fiction has little chance at a publisher unless it is presented by an agent. So we mailed out query letters, synopses, and sample chapters to agents. After a while, my wife took up this chore because I found it so frustrating. But even she finally grew tired of agent rejection letters. So I decided to self-publish.

I began evaluating my options. One question was how to physically produce the books. Should I pay to have someone print a thousand copies? This is the traditional mode of self-publishing, and sometimes it’s the best. But I wasn’t sure where I would put all those books, and it required thousands of dollars up front. Printing that many books does have the distinct advantage of lowering your cost per book. The other option for physically producing books is print on demand (POD) technology. With this option, your book gets printed from a digital copy whenever someone orders one. Your cost per book is higher, but you don’t have to shell out a lot of money up front, and you don’t have to find a place to store all those books.

I was attracted to POD because it seemed like an inexpensive way to get my feet wet. After all, as long as I retained the copyright, I could always go back and try the other way. When I started looking at POD options, the one that jumped out at me was Lulu.com. If you were willing to do most of the work of setting up the book, they would literally publish your book for free, with the minor exception that you had to buy a sample copy of the book.

Basically, if you upload a typeset book to Lulu in Word or PDF, you can publish it and get it listed on Amazon for about 150 dollars.

I paid an artist friend to do the front cover, and a professional photographer to do a back cover photo. I tried to pay a friend who is an editor to edit it, but she insisted on working for just a big dinner out with both our families. It was a nice place, so I guess that cost 300 dollars or so, but I did get a good meal out of it too! I laid out the back cover myself, using Paint-Shop Pro, carefully following Lulu’s requirements.

The big job was typesetting. You can do a pretty good job of typesetting using Microsoft Word. Word has a great selection of fonts and can justify the text on both sides. Word can even do kerning. So that's what I did first. I took my 600 pages of double-space 8.5x11 text, changed the paper size and a lot of Word options, and did the front-matter of the book – a title page, a copyright notice page, etc. It came out pretty good. To a lot of people it looked perfectly professional.

There were some things wrong, but among my close associates, only I saw them. Then I chanced to show the sample copy to a friend, Lyman Hazelton, a professional scientist, and he began singing the praises of a computer program that does good typesetting, better than Word.

That program is LaTeX. It's not pronounced like it looks. It's pronounced like lay-tech. LaTex is a semi-user-friendly tool for using Tex, a less-user-friendly tool for preparing documents. Tex (pronounced Tech) was created years ago by a computer guru who wanted to make his published math papers look good.

Well, hearing Lyman praise the program's capabilities, I decided to look into it. First I found a site to download the whole thing for free. That took a while, even with DSL. No doubt I downloaded more than I needed. Then I went to the public library and got a book LaTex.

Finally, I plunged into the re-typesetting task. I stayed up very late for a Friday, Saturday, Sunday combination, and actually got it done. Lyman had told me it was an easy package. In a way, it obviously was, since I got it done in 3 calendar days. But, boy, I had to work at it. Here's the thing - the work was a lot like the work I do day in and out. It was a lot like programming, testing, debugging, locating programs, studying the technical documentation, searching the internet for answers, and so on.

Here is a brief outline of the steps involved:

1. Save the original Word document as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file.
2. Use a program someone wrote to do a preliminary (but flawed!) conversion to TeX format (.tex).
3. Use an editor (even Word will do) to edit the TeX file to fix problems and make the file come out exactly how you want.
4. Using line commands, run latex2e.exe to convert the TeX file to a Device Independent file (.dvi).
5. Use another handy utility to convert the DVI file to an Adobe Portable Document File (.pdf).

That's all there is to it. Well, I took some other steps, but you could get by with these. Of course, expect to spend some time looping between 3 and 5. I can't tell you how many times I ran steps 3, 4, and 5. One thing I still didn't figure out is how to load a good choice of fonts. I just worked with the default version of Roman.

I printed a sample copy out at Lulu, and was happy with the result, so I paid to get an ISBN number, a barcode, and a catalog listing so the book would be available at Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com.

Now I had to market the darned thing. But that is a tale for another time.

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