What do you say when your friend Anita calls, tells you she's editing a book for a friend of hers (motorcycle industry guru John Wyckoff), and asks if you can have the book printed and delivered to a trade show ... in a little under three weeks?!?!?
You say, "Sure, no problem," of course.
Well, actually you ask a bunch of questions about how close the manuscript is to being done, file formats, sizes, quantities, cover design, and so on. Then you check with your new best friend at local printer City Blue Imaging for a quote and delivery estimate.
But in the end, Anita's a friend ... so your answer is basically the same: "Get it to us by next Wednesday and we'll get it to the conference on time."
Then you hang up the phone and scream, "How are we going to do THAT?"
After another few moments of panic, you take a couple of breaths and get to work. In this case, we had several things going for us. First, we had a couple of days before the manuscript would arrive to work on a cover design, assign an ISBN and obtain the Bookland EAN barcode for the back, and think about the inside layout of the book itself.
Second, the book contained only a few simple black and white graphics. The tables and a scanned form were no problem. The clip art graphic used as logo for the chapter headings needed some fussing in Photoshop to create a clean, 300 dpi image. But that was nothing compared to the complex images and varied formats that are invovled in most book projects.
Third (and most important), we had Anita doing the editing. (As an aside, Anita ran an interesting post on her blog the other day from Guest Author Wayne McVicker, discussing his own experience and advice on self-publishing his book, Starting Something.)
Anita was working in Microsoft Word, which produces files that are generally unusable for commercial print projects. But she understood things like the need to format the pages as facing pages with alternating inside margins and how to create margins that corresponded to the finished 5.5" x 8.5" trim size.
Working with Anita's manuscript made it much easier than most to flow the text into a professional page layout program (we use Adobe InDesign CS). Adding page masters for the headers and footers and inserting the front matter completed the task.
Here's the result: we were able to overnight 100 copies of his finsihed book, MYOB-2: The Complete Guide to Profitable Powersports Dealerships, to John in time for his attendance at the 2005 V-Twin Expo held in Cincinnati January 29-31.
And he sold all but 4 on site, without any pre-marketing, signage, a booth of his own, or any of the usual preparation.
Okay, it was not as easy, or as smooth, as I'm making it sound. There were lots of little glitches, big gulps, and another scream or two, over those two and a half weeks.
And yes, there were trade-offs -- the biggest one being that we had no time to send the print proofs to Anita or John. They got to look at PDF's of the cover and page layout online and had to take it on faith that the print proofs looked even better. I doubt any of us would have been willing to make that trade-off, but for working with friends.
We definitely don't recommend turning out books at this pace, as a regular practice. But in this case, John had a great opportunity to show off his new book at an industry trade show and sell a few copies to start creating buzz.
POD, a great editor, and help from an author services company made it possible for John to seize that opportunity.
In similar circumstances, we'd probably answer, again, "Sure, no problem." And then hang up ... and scream ... and then get to work.
Authors helping authors. A-ha!
We made record time, didn't we? Thanks for all your help, Yvonne and Tom and Maryanne.
Posted by: Anita Campbell | March 03, 2005 at 01:11 AM