sketches: The Print Version
The proof copy of the sketches anthology arrived yesterday. This one is from lulu, and it really is so good to finally have something tangible, even with the irony of immediately uploading an intangible post here about the blasted thing. I must admit to have sent an email with the same hastily taken blackberry picture above about 15 minutes after tearing it from its wrappings, with all the time in between spent pouring over every page. It is a proof after all.
I couldn't find any major faults of my own, and lulu's printing is absolutely top grade. That said, I did have some hassle actually getting the proof. And the time I could have spent idly twiddling my thumbs waiting for their technical support to get back to me I instead employed myself with more research into the whole vanity press issue and alternative options should lulu fall through. So I now have another reformatted version for amazon.com's CreateSpace service.
I have to say both look to be good companies. Certainly more suited to my goals as a writer of very limited means for this project than many of the other vanity press guys out there. lulu.com is very easy to use, but they fall down on a few technical issues. My main problem was with their rendering of my cover on their website and the subsequent download. I spent a good amount of time making a fully vectored tree for the cover, and embedding all the fonts correctly so that everything would appear to be smooth and clean; but when I looked at the preview they offered it all became terribly pixellated and quite ugly. I looked around their support forums and it seemed to be a common problem, with some threads on the same issue having been started way back. I think 2006 was the earliest I saw). But there wasn't really any adequate solution given, apart from wait for the proof and see, and I suppose they haven't redone their infrastructure at any point in the last five years to produce a preview that is up to the author's overwhelmingly high standards. The second problem was found with a voucher code for a free proof copy for myself. Now this was my fault though related to the cover issue, but after pressing the publish button, or whatever it was, I went back to upload a newly saved cover pdf, thinking that I hadn't embedded the fonts correctly on the previous one that had been so mutilated by their preview. So the voucher code was rejected, and I had to wait almost two weeks for their awfully slow technical support to get back to me. They did fix the code and get me my complimentary copy, but not before I had been lured into CreateSpace.
The biggest appeal with CreateSpace is the vast number of zero money options. There's a free ISBN on offer, and I think they automatically put the book on amazon.com, both of which are things that I really want for sketches. That said, they seem to be a touch more expensive, which is to say that they take more of a cut from each book. Which I don't really mind, especially since I don't have to fork out from amazon access or an ISBN. I mean I'm not in this for the profit, otherwise I'd have been a hell of a lot more motivated, and a thousand times more disappointed with the tiny margins employed by the publishing industry. All this is a bit by-the-by for the moment though, since I want to be impressed by their print quality first. Not impressed to the extent of, entering St Peter's in Rome, or viewing the Great Wall of China, impressed, but they have to at least equal lulu's printing.
Watch this space...
Post Script.
I should probably and will probably make a separate post when a decision is actually made (and when I'm less tired, but for now I clicked the little button on lulu to give the Anthology a publicly accessible page. So feel free one and all (all being only one), to make a minor donation with the end result of a beautiful little book shaped package at the end. Shipping in the UK is something like £3, the actual cost is £5. http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/sketches-anthology/10880077