Book proofs are here!
about 6 years ago
– Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 11:33:27 AM
Hi, folks, the proof sheets of the print edition just arrived this morning. They look great! Proofs are what a printer sends you to make sure what they produced from your files match your expectations. Because I’m using digital printing (see below), these are essentially 100% identical with the final product.
I need to go over them very carefully to ensure there are no changes needed. And because have to pay the printer (a modest hourly rate) for revision time to re-rasterize and otherwise process files if there are, I hope I did a good pre-check job. Once approved, I should have the books in hand and ready to ship at the start of March, as I’d hoped.
This is my first go-round with four-color digital printing for a book, and I picked a company that a picky design friend had worked with and that sent me samples that looked pretty spectacular. Digital printing is more or less a fancy word for high-end laser or ink-jet printing with inline binding, and a lot of control. For instance, I could have opted to print some of the book in black only and some in color, and the binding unit could automatically insert the color pages in the right place. It doesn't have the perfection and crispness of offset printing, but it continues to inch closer. For small quantities or short books, it’s a godsend to get books this good. I’ve also noticed, however, that offset printers work with much smaller quantities than in the past, as they’ve used digital methods to shave overhead costs. A printer I’ve worked with will now quote down to 500 copies, which used to be ridiculously low for offset.
Print hyperlinks: I used an idea in the print edition for hyperlinks similar to a previous book I’d worked out this way. Linked text in the ebook and print book has a dotted underline. The ebook you can obviously click. In the print book, you can download a PDF or view a Web page of links in the order they appear in the book, noted by page. The copyright page of the print edition has a URL for that links page and PDF download.
Side note on shipping: International shipping costs have gone way up from 2017 to 2018, and shipping this thin volume from Seattle is going to cost a lot more than expected, unfortunately! I’ve been trying to find someone in the London area who I could ship a box of books to along with shipping labels, pay the VAT on them, and then pay them an hourly rate to mail the several dozen orders for London, the rest of UK, Europe, and Australia. If you or someone you know fits that bill, get in touch! I’ve talked to transshipping firms, but the cost per book for a commercial firm is higher than what it would cost to ship each one from Seattle.
Ebook and print bundle backers, you should all have received your ebook copies. I've been releasing minor updates as people reported errors and I found them. The current release is 1.0.7. If you look at the copyright page of the ebook, there's a link and password to always download the latest version. You can also visit the BackerKit site, log in, and download the latest version there.
