Jon Chaisson's Blog - Posts Tagged "diy"
On Doing It DIY
Back when I first started taking my writing seriously — I mean, as in thinking “Hey, I kinda like doing this, I could see myself doing it professionally” and setting out a goal to actually finish a full novel, way back before I actually knew how to do it — was in the mid to late 80s when I was in my mid-teens. Out of that came the Infamous War Book (basically a Red Dawn pastiche), which took me three years to finish, in between false starts, obsessive planning, revisions, homework, and hanging out with friends. On the one hand it was kind of expected I’d be a writer, considering my dad was a local reporter and historian, and well known in the area; many adults would not have been surprised if I followed in his footsteps. On the other hand, though, I was following a path I didn’t think any other kids my age would have followed. I knew a handful of kids who wrote stories alongside me, but I think their interest was more on what many nowadays would consider the fanfic level. A fun thing to do as a hobby, but their career paths lay elsewhere.
Around the same time, I’d discovered college radio (which I still go on about to this day, as you can tell from my other blog). After years of listening to commercial radio and being fed a cross section of classic rock and pop hits, the college radio thing hit me like a revelation: you don’t have to be commercial, you know. I was completely drawn to the DIY aspect of it all; they weren’t exactly writing and recording music for the fame, they were writing and recording because they wanted to. And I had a real respect for that. It was a real inspiration on multiple levels for me, from my clothes to the way I thought and acted. It also inspired my writing quite a bit — in the latter half of the IWN, you can really see a change to a much darker mood and style. I may not have been the leather-and-mohawk punk; I was more the Morrissey, hiding in my bedroom with my books and my music and writing the most brilliant things. I eventually grew out of the self-important lifestyle, but the thirst for creativity remained.
[...]
Read the rest at:
http://welcometobridgetown.com/2015/0...
Around the same time, I’d discovered college radio (which I still go on about to this day, as you can tell from my other blog). After years of listening to commercial radio and being fed a cross section of classic rock and pop hits, the college radio thing hit me like a revelation: you don’t have to be commercial, you know. I was completely drawn to the DIY aspect of it all; they weren’t exactly writing and recording music for the fame, they were writing and recording because they wanted to. And I had a real respect for that. It was a real inspiration on multiple levels for me, from my clothes to the way I thought and acted. It also inspired my writing quite a bit — in the latter half of the IWN, you can really see a change to a much darker mood and style. I may not have been the leather-and-mohawk punk; I was more the Morrissey, hiding in my bedroom with my books and my music and writing the most brilliant things. I eventually grew out of the self-important lifestyle, but the thirst for creativity remained.
[...]
Read the rest at:
http://welcometobridgetown.com/2015/0...
Physical Book Status: Almost there!
The physical book version of A Division of Souls is coming along, and let me tell you, formatting the text for physical consumption is a LOT different from ebook formatting.
Put it this way: With e-books, the text is a little more elastic. The book can be X number of pages long, but when the reader looks at it on their own hardware, that may change depending on a few things such as font style and size. While flipping pages, you may see "Page 3 of 500" three or four times before it finally ticks over to "Page 4."
Physical books are different, and here's why, especially if you plan on doing it DIY through something like CreateSpace: WYSIWYG. The text you format is the text you're going to see on the printed page. It might be simplistic, in Times New Roman double-spaced and left-aligned with the page number in the top right corner, when you save the file, and that's what will show up on the printed page.
Which is kinda not what you want in a print book.
You want the following:
--Page numbers on the outside of each page (left side for the left pages, right side for the right pages, natch), and starting at the right time
--Interesting and readable font and line spacing (I chose Garamond 12pt, 1.05-spaced and justified)
--Any text tweaking (size, shape, justification, etc) done correctly
--Any hyperlinks in the ebook taken out for the print version
...and so many more little fiddly things that can easily get forgotten.
This is why it's taken me longer to get the physical book out. I've lost count how many times I've uploaded the file to the CreateSpace platform, only to find yet another formatting error that needs fixing.
So where am I now? Well, I'm currently awaiting a UPS box that should contain a few galley copies of the novel. Having that in my hands, aside from the excitement of it being MY FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK OMG, I'll be red-penning it for any last minute fixes that I'll need to make, if any. And only then will I finally hit that "Publish" button and it'll be available to everyone.
So yeah, I'm getting there. Slowly but surely. :)
Put it this way: With e-books, the text is a little more elastic. The book can be X number of pages long, but when the reader looks at it on their own hardware, that may change depending on a few things such as font style and size. While flipping pages, you may see "Page 3 of 500" three or four times before it finally ticks over to "Page 4."
Physical books are different, and here's why, especially if you plan on doing it DIY through something like CreateSpace: WYSIWYG. The text you format is the text you're going to see on the printed page. It might be simplistic, in Times New Roman double-spaced and left-aligned with the page number in the top right corner, when you save the file, and that's what will show up on the printed page.
Which is kinda not what you want in a print book.
You want the following:
--Page numbers on the outside of each page (left side for the left pages, right side for the right pages, natch), and starting at the right time
--Interesting and readable font and line spacing (I chose Garamond 12pt, 1.05-spaced and justified)
--Any text tweaking (size, shape, justification, etc) done correctly
--Any hyperlinks in the ebook taken out for the print version
...and so many more little fiddly things that can easily get forgotten.
This is why it's taken me longer to get the physical book out. I've lost count how many times I've uploaded the file to the CreateSpace platform, only to find yet another formatting error that needs fixing.
So where am I now? Well, I'm currently awaiting a UPS box that should contain a few galley copies of the novel. Having that in my hands, aside from the excitement of it being MY FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK OMG, I'll be red-penning it for any last minute fixes that I'll need to make, if any. And only then will I finally hit that "Publish" button and it'll be available to everyone.
So yeah, I'm getting there. Slowly but surely. :)
