Emblem Divide – Free serialised book for charity

As it turns out, the cost of the “Digest” version was all related to the county of manufacturer. The Publisher Grade paper is what killed me. To print on publisher grade paper meant it had to be printed in the States, meaning the cost of shipping was huge. I decided to make the switch to A5 size, this meant repaginating everything once again. As I neared the checkout stage, I again realised something was amiss, the price of the book itself was around £25, but this time with a reduced £7 for shipping. Even though it was far cheaper than the Digest size, I really wanted something smaller.

I had looked at the “Pocket” sized books, but on downloading the template, realised something was wrong. The template was the wrong page size, and was set up for 8.5 x 5.5 in. I decided quickly that if there was any hope of getting it printed, I’d have to make up my own template. Luckily Lulu.com is very good at providing all the exact dimensions of pages and margins. At 23:40 I was getting fairly tired, but decided I had to get the main document finished and repaginated before I went to sleep.

With the new template created, I finished repaginating the document and set about creating the page styles. I didn’t want the chapter heading pages to have page numbers, so I had to set up the styling in Open Office to make this so. After this was all finally complete, I changed the page numbering to start at chapter one and set about resizing the cover. Finally it was complete, and the document was uploaded. The price came out at £12 for printing and £7 for shipping. The entire 642 page book, with colour covers, including shipping, came out at under £20. For a one off copy, the price was very acceptable.

Lessons have been learnt here, and I will pay much more attention to the cost per page numbers that Lulu.com actually provides when choosing a size. Nevertheless, my skills at repaginating have been honed.

Next time :: Designing the cover

Throughout the entire process of writing I had been using a page size I had measured from a book I had been reading back in 2003. Many people write just on plain A4 sized document, but for me visualising the book in it’s final form is a very important part of the process. I do take into consideration the length of chapters and whether I want a specific chapter to be long or short. Rather than sit there and try to gauge word counts or work out roughly how many words to a page, I just prefer to write on a page size that will in some way reflect the end product.

I wanted the size of the book to be near on pocket size. Lisa has a large amount of Stephen King books and though I forget the publishers name now, there is a particular, common format of book which I wanted to emulate. Having printed a smaller book previously at lulu.com, they seemed like the best option to investigate getting Emblem Divide printed. It wasn’t long before I had picked a book size that was similar enough to the size I had devised in 2003 and reformatted the entire document to fit that page size.

It may not sound like a lot of work, formatting the book to fit a new size, but reading on, you’ll see my issues. Lulu.com provided templates for the books, which had the page sizes and margins correctly configured. I downloaded the template and jiggled all the pages around so that chapters started on a right hand page. I uploaded the document to lulu.com, including the custom built cover sheet, more on that in a later post, and clicked on the link to purchase a copy.

The size I had picked, “Digest”, was to be printed on Publisher Grade paper. This was in line with what I had envisaged the book to look like. A much cheaper type of paper, a little thicker, but really giving that paperback feel. Originally I had wanted to go for a hardback, but that option had proved too costly. I put the book in my basket, and clicked onto the next page. The price of shipping was around the £10 mark, not too bad, but on reading the disclaimer I discovered that it came with absolutely no warrenty that the book would arrive at all and couldn’t be tracked. This didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence, so I chose the next shipping option. £70. That’s right £70. I almost fell off my chair.

Find out more in Part 2