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Adventures in Self Publishing – Mistake #4 – Typesetting

 

I’m not sure I really understood what modern typesetting was. In the olden days of mechanical printing presses, a human selected individual letter stamps made of lead, grouped them into blocks to form words, and positioned them in wooden frames to make pages. The whole assembly was then inked and pressed onto paper.

Digital printing changed all that didn’t it?

Turns out there’s still a bit of work to do.

Fortunately, this is one area that has a great solution.

I wrote my story Phosphate Rocks – A Death in Ten Objects in Microsoft Word. I tried Scrivener for a while and it has many good features,  I always come back to MS Word. Over time I’ve taught my grammar and spell checker what to tolerate. I like the simple thesaurus. I use Heading Styles and a Navigation pane to manage the story flow.

After many rounds of editing with my previous publisher, Sandstone Press, the most up to date version of ‘the work’ was a pdf file.

I went to an online ALLi forum, had a good moan, and got some useful advice. From there I found Reedsy and their excellent free typesetting tool.

https://editor.reedsy.com

First step was to convert the pdf file back to MS Word. The alternative would have been to compare it with the last word file I had and redo every individual revision – I discounted that option as a lot more work.

There are free online pdf convertors, I but I have one upstairs. The love of my life has Adobe Acrobat Pro so this step was relatively straightforward, although it did involve some negotiation and the house is cleaner than it was before. Like my cleaning skills, no conversion is perfect and in retrospect I should have checked the file more carefully before proceeding.

Next step was to load the MS Word document into the Reedsy editor.

The editor accepts DOCX (Microsoft Word Open XML Format) and ODT (Open Document Text) files, up to 250Mb.

Uploading (or copy-pasting individual chapters) respects the original formatting. Indents are added, text is perfectly justified, margins, headers, footers, and page numbers are added .

After a few style decisions, suddenly I had a beautifully typset and indexed book again. Brand new pdfs, ready to print in a range of trims (sizes) and an e-pub ready to load and publish.

Isn’t it nice when something you were dreading, turns out to be surprisingly easy? Better than easy, the Reedsy editor platform is a really well-designed writer-friendly tool and made the final reviewing and checking steps a positive pleasure. And (for the moment at least) it’s free.

The Reedsy platform opens up lots of possibilities for paid collaboration with editors or translators or (if you have complex figures and table or want to specify other fonts and layouts) additional typesetting services, all with complete revision control.

I’ve even experimented writing directly to it.

So what did I learn about typesetting?

 My mistakes #4

1. I spent far too long trying to establish who owned the digital files after my publisher, Sandstone Press, went into liquidation. As the author I only owned the content, not the appearance and it took the Society of Authors (SoA) to remind me of that.
2. I fretted about the different file formats (epub and mobi and pdf and doc…). The ALLi forum was great for practical help, but all the information is out there on the internet, you just have to decide you’re not going to let the jargon beat you.
3. I should have spent more time cleaning up the file converted from a pdf to word before uploading it into the Reedsy editor. But making changes in the editor did help me to get to know the platform better and it’s a lovely space to work in.
4. Choose your spellcheck language in the editor (eg English GB rather than English US) before you start your final checks.

What I learned

There are some fantastically helpful people on forums like ALLi, but in the end you have to do some work yourself.

The Reedsy typesetting tool is user-friendly and free.

Financial update

Self-published sales to date – 15

Number of full price sales required to offset external cost to date – 389

Phosphate Rocks – A Death in Ten Objects is available to order from all good bookshops, is in stock at Drake the Bookshop. It can also be found in ebook and audio format HERE.

Back to Mistake #3

Continue to Mistake #5