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While looking for a way to publish my recent book, Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems, I learned how to bring a book to print and make it available for purchase using little money and common (mostly open source) tools.

1. Doing books the old way
2. Discovering print-on-demand
3. Choosing a print-on-demand vendor
4. Designing the book
5. Choosing a formatting tool
6. Creating the cover
7. Making financial arrangements
8. Conclusion

Doing books the old way

Publishing a book can be a nightmare. In the past there were two methods: submit to and be accepted by a publisher, or do it yourself.

To get the book published by an established company, writers have often had to deal with enormous competition and morasses of middlemen. And self-publishing has a bad reputation: it costs a lot, production quality is often low, and effective distribution is almost impossible. While excellent small presses have existed for a long time, they too are limited in what they can afford to produce and market.

I had been wanting to do a collection of my scores and writings about music for years, but the economics and logistics of creating a large book stymied me. Self-publication generates expenses such as

• Setting the book up to be printed
• Printing
• Shipping
• Storage

And that's not all. Once I got my carload of books back from the print shop, I would face the hassle of trying to convince stores to carry it. Or I could attempt to sell it myself by mail or Internet, both of which would probably require me to process credit cards and to take care of other business headaches for which I have neither interest nor aptitude.

Discovering print-on-demand

Recently, however, a new option, print-on-demand, has come along that gets around the problems of both printing and distribution. With the new print-on-demand systems, printers can now create books one at a time -- individual copies -- rather than producing a run of several thousand. Working with a print-on-demand company is easy and inexpensive and can produce thoroughly professional results.

Print-on-demand printers print and bind books one at a time from computer files that you create and send to them, using new "smart" presses that work more like a photocopier than a traditional offset press. Surprisingly, these books are indistinguishable from conventionally printed ones, assuming the preliminary design is done right. In fact, you probably already own books printed this way: a growing number of publishers use print-on-demand systems, especially for their back catalog of older books that sell few copies each year.

I worried about the quality and longevity of the printing until I played around with a few sample copies. I subjected them to unscientific torture tests, including flinging them about the room, leaving them on radiators and on a dashboard in the summer sun for several days, and spilling coffee on them. The books survived quite well. The print remained unsmeared and the binding held together as well as conventionally produced books did under the same conditions.

Choosing a print-on-demand vendor

One company using this technology is Lightning Source of LaVergne, Tennessee. Lightning Source works hard to make their systems equally useful to large and small publishers. In fact, they sent me the samples for the testing I described above at no charge. They also provided a set of clear guidelines for creating and submitting files.

Lightning Source is a subsidiary of Ingram, the largest book distributor in North America and possibly in the world. Because of this, any book published through Lightning Source automatically becomes available to just about any bookstore.

This combination makes it possible for anyone to create books inexpensively and get them to customers quite easily. The total costs for creating the book were about $200, not counting the home computers and software that I already had.

Once I found out about Lightning Source, I registered with their site as a publisher, downloaded the specifications for print-on-demand books, and was then able to begin developing and designing the book.

This involved some risk, since the whole plan for creating the book, which developed over about three years, depended on this one company. It's become obvious over the past few years that no company, regardless of size or backing, is either immortal or immune from abrupt changes of policy. But Lightning Source is continuing to do well and seems relatively stable.

Designing the book

I have long been interested in print and book design. I had also created a large amount of technical documentation over the years, and one large non-technical publication (the book-length poem Shekhinah: The Presence, also available from Metatron Press).

The single best book that I have found on book design is The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design by Jan Tschichold. A designer for, among others, Penguin Books and the creator of the Sabon family of typefaces, Tschichold derived his principles from years of study of classic books. While his writing can be harsh and autocratic, his ideas have real worth.

Lightning Source prints books in a variety of sizes. I selected a page size of 6 inches wide by 9 inches deep because they can print it daily rather than weekly, and because pages of that size fit Tschichold's ideal proportions--a 2/3 ratio between the height and width. They print all 6x9 inch books on good-quality 60 lb offset, opaque, 444 PPI, crème white acid-free paper.

In Tschichold's ideal, page margins also fit a simple set of proportions: the inside, top, outside, and bottom margins use the ration 2:3:4:6, with the height of the rectangle of text equal to the width of the full page (in this case, six inches). Lightning Source requires publishers to submit the pages of their books in PDF (Acrobat) format, centering the content of the eventual printed page within an 8.5x11 inch page in the PDF file. Combining these factors, I set the page margins to:

I allowed 1/2 inch for the header and footer. However, after looking at the result and at other books, I now believe the headers and footers should be outside the 6-inch text block. In preparing another book for press, I've expanded the text block itself by a half inch above and below, and I prefer the new proportions.

In developing the book, I found myself moving the files among several computers and printing on a variety of printers. Because of this, I limited the typefaces to those most commonly found on PCs: Times Roman, Helvetica, and Courier. (In the score to "Gray Code (Realization #1)", I also used the Wingding typeface for non-alphabetic characters.) I set the text in 11-point type, a size larger than that used in most books, so that performers could read the scores easily while using them.

Choosing a formatting tool

I prefer, when possible, to use free, open source software in my work. At the beginning of the project, I began to use LaTeX, the free document-processing system that is the standard for creating academic papers and scientific work. LaTeX creates beautiful pages, with the best type handling (in terms of spacing, kerning, hyphenation, and similar issues) available on any but the most expensive platforms.

At the time, however, LaTeX turned out to be the wrong tool for this task. While its default formats that LaTeX includes are excellent, I found it surprisingly hard to create new formats or change existing ones to fit the needs of the material. Most of the text scores in the book use an idiosyncratic format derived from computer programming, in which each line of text is indented to aid the eye in grouping information together, and in which successive lines rarely have the same formatting. For example, the score to "Shuundak" on page 258 begins:

Someone begins a sound

beginning with any combination

of notes and phonemes

and continuing in a sustained sound.

Creating new formats in LaTeX didn't seem feasible at the time, several years ago, at which I had to decide on tools (though I could do it now, if needed, and am preparing Metatron Press's next book in LaTeX).

Adobe FrameMaker is possibly the best of the graphical book layout systems, so I downloaded a copy of the beta version for Linux. Unfortunately, Adobe canceled the Linux version. By then, I was too far along to change software and formats again, so I did the rest of the project in FrameMaker under Windows 98. FrameMaker costs several hundred dollars, which could be prohibitive for one-man shops, but since I could afford it at the time, I decided that it was worth buying.

The book is made up of musical scores and related writings, composed over the course of more than 20 years. Most of these scores existed as handwritten or printed pages and a few as computer files in a wide variety of formats. I typed up all those that existed only on paper, and converted and reformatted the others. As it turned out, it would have been quicker to go ahead and retype them. I revised almost all the scores to make them clearer and easier to use and added opening footnotes to most of the scores explaining their context and how they were created.

Not counting the covers, the book contains only one graphic image. Originally it was to have 10 more, but I was dissatisfied with their quality after many weeks of trying to create them and dropped the concept.

Creating the cover

The cover was created as a TIFF file, partially in The GIMP, a free Linux graphics program, but primarily in Photoshop on a Mac. The front cover graphic was built from existing images, photographs from my 1992 performance piece Shekhinah: the Presence that I scanned from prints on an inexpensive home scanner.

Brian Fending, our graphic artist, then imported the graphics onto the Mac. Working at first from a scanned freehand sketch that I had done of a possible design, then together with me at his computer, he took the graphics and text elements and created the cover as it now stands. Lightning Source helpfully provided guidelines for calculating the size of the spine, and therefore the entire cover; this book, being a little over 400 pages long, required a spine one inch wide.

When the book and cover were complete, I had others examine it carefully for errors and problems before declaring it ready to print. I then submitted the body of the book to Lightning Source as an 0.86 megabyte PDF file, and the cover as a 42,13 megabyte TIF file.

Making financial arrangements

Setting up the arrangement with Lightning Source required legal contracts with my publishing company, Metatron Press. The company is a loose cooperative of individual artists and had not faced some of the legal issues before. To avoid complications, I established Metatron Press of New Jersey as a legally independent sole proprietorship. I was already registered as a publisher with the R. R. Bowker company, which publishes Books in Print and distributes ISBN numbers.

Once that was done, I was able to set up the company's agreement with Lightning Source. There was no fee involved in setting up the Metatron Press account; all charges were on a per-book basis.

The up-front costs for setting up the book were:

These costs assume that the book files require no corrections or touch-ups. Modifications at the print shop can get very expensive very quickly, so you must be sure to have the files exactly right before submitting them.

Printing each copy of the book costs a flat 90 cents fee plus 1.3 cents per page. For the 424 page book, this adds up to $6.42 per book.

Once the book is submitted, it takes at least 15 days to get the title set up, depending on how backed up they are, and somewhat longer to get into dealer databases. Amazon took about a week more to list the book.

When a customer wants a copy of Surprise Me With Beauty or any print-on-demand book, the bookseller passes the order to Lightning Source. Lightning Source sends a copy, charging the bookseller the standard wholesale price for new publishers--55% off the retail price. I set the retail price at $19.95. Therefore, the wholesale price is $8.98. The publisher gets the difference between the $8.98 wholesale price and the $6.42 printing cost, in this case $2.56 per copy. Lightning Source keeps track of sales, and send a check with a detailed report monthly.

You can also directly order copies of your book from Lightning Source at a discount related to the printing costs. For instance, I ordered 25 at $7.26 apiece to take with me on a book and performance tour. As it turned out, I should have ordered more, since demand was higher than I expected and the books went quite quickly.

While the books are usually shipped (UPS Ground by default, though faster and more expensive means are possible), I had the fortunate coincidence of being in Tennessee just as the order was ready, and arranged to pick up the books at their plant in La Vergne. This also gave me the opportunity to meet my gracious and helpful sales and production people.

Conclusion

Print-on-demand is not a panacea for publishers. It won't magically improve a book's design or the quality of its writing. And, while it smoothes out many distribution and sales issues, doesn't address marketing. But it does allow even the smallest company. with sufficient effort, time, and care, to publish books that can favorably compare in production, packaging, and availability with any on the market today.

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