Zatera Ul

This is for my own reference as much as anything else:

1. It’s much easier to format your book while you write it than to go back and format it all after it’s written. It took me almost as long to format the book as it did to write it.

2. Open Office Writer is not too bad, and it is free, but learning how to do some things, such as page styles, in it was a lot of work.

3. In particular, connecting page styles in sequence was something that I had a hard time figuring out. The answer is to put in a page break, specify which page style follows the break, and in the options for that page style, specify which page style goes on the next page. This is how you chain different page styles together, particularly for chapters, where the first page in the chapter has a particular style, then the rest of the chapter alternates between two different styles (left page and right page).

4. Putting the chapter title up in the page header means having a distinct set of the three chapter-related page styles for each chapter, so that the heading has the correct chapter title, and the page style flow is correct.

5. Look at books in your own library for examples of book sizes, fonts, page layouts, and so forth that you would like to use in your book (Lulu leaves practically all the layout and formatting to you; some other print-on-demand/self-publishing services provide software that does some of that for you).

6. If in mid-project you feel like you’re a terrible writer and graphic designer, go look at what has been published by the professionals. People have been paid good money to do much worse work than you can do today in your own home. Printing presses are very expensive machines, particularly when they’re idle, so publishers will throw all sorts of crap into print in the slack times. (It is quite helpful to read about the basics of graphic design before you start do-it-yourselfing.)

7. Figuring out early in the project how you want to distribute/market the book will help; Lulu has somewhat more stringent guidelines for manuscripts that you have them act as distributor for. Expect to have to do most of the marketing of your book yourself.

8. Pay attention to which fonts Lulu prefers. I put a non-Lulu font in the manuscript, by embedding the font in the PDF. On the cover, I put the non-Lulu font text in the cover image, so it was just part of the image.

9. Lulu’s FAQs on making covers are a little skimpy. I made it through and ended up with a cover that looked ok, but I couldn’t even tell you for sure if it was a “one-piece cover” or a “two-piece cover”. I think it was a two-piece. On my end, I did all my cover design in an image editing program, starting with the Lulu cover templates, and made a single cover image for the front cover that contained the title and everything, and another image for the back cover. Then in the Lulu wizards, I turned off the title they were trying to superimpose on the front cover image, and went from there.

10. It’s much easier to catch typos and bad phrasing on a paper printout than on a computer screen. Easier to mark it up with red pen, too.

11. I used Inkscape (free) for my image editing, but it doesn’t export images to any of the file formats that Lulu requires, so I had to export to a format that Adobe Illustrator (free version) could import, and then export again to a Lulu-compatible file format. The images still came out ok in the end.

12. My husband the talented amateur photographer took digital pictures of my drawings for the book, because we didn’t have a scanner available.

13. Lulu’s online book previews are much lower quality, resolution-wise, than the actual printed book, or digital download version of the book.

14. If you want your book to bring in some profit, don’t write a novel or a book of poems. Write something that has useful information for your readers, one way or another. I was surprised to find no other books on the same subject as mine (frugal baby care) on Lulu at all.

15. If you price your book without any profit to yourself, Lulu will allow you to offer it as a free download. (My book is available for free download until next November).

16. Writing a book is a lot of work, but you can get it done a little bit at a time; the same way you eat an elephant.

17. I used FreeMind (free software) for my book outline. This builds a tree-like structure of nodes. The big benefit of FreeMind over creating a traditional outline in a word processor is that you can “fold up” and hide some of the smaller branches and leaves of the tree, and just view the trunk and major branches. Toward the end of the outlining process, the outline got large and unwieldy and slow. But my computer is very old.

18. While I was in the process of writing, several resources that I didn’t know about before serendipitously fell into my lap, and I was able to draw on them for the book.

19. Before you start quoting from other works, read up on copyright and Fair Use and plagiarism. All but the very shortest of quotes may require written permission from the copyright holder to use in your book. In my opinion, shorter quotes are allowable under Fair Use (a very ill-defined principle) without requiring permission. Stating another’s idea in different words is not a copyright violation.

20. When you think you have the book nearly done, you still have a lot of work left to do. It’s kind of like an event horizon, time stretches out around you, while your distance from being completely done remains almost constant. At some point, you’re going to have to call it “good enough” and quit. It’s not easy.