How I Self-Published the Anthology 'blank tapes' (part 2)
Last time I set up why I wanted to publish 'blank tapes volume 1: weird and dangerous tales' (to give it its full title). This time I'll delve into the rudimentary fundamentals.
At the core is of course the stories. For this anthology I asked a few friends who I knew would have the right kind of material. Luckily everything that was sent my way was of exceptional quality so I didn't need to worry about turning them down, or, more likely, publishing the story anyway.
There was no deadline, and with a little prompting I eventually got all the pieces. They each went through a few rounds of proofreading, though the standard was very high so thankfully I didn't have to expend a lot of time weeding out errors. This allowed my to focus on assembling them and formatting the book.
Initially I tried Scrivener, the software I use to write everything. It has a great interface that allows you to manage discrete blocks of text, say individual chapters, or short stories in this case. You can endlessly rearrange them without having to cut and paste like you might with Word. The order of the stories in a collection like this is important. The first story is going to be seen in the preview on the store front, so it had to be a great opener. Unfortunately I also included a rather pretentious introduction to the book which may have worked against it. Ultimately the preview did include some of Anna Cotton's 'Red Arrows'. This story was the most straight forward of the group (relatively speaking of course, it's still 'out there') and was perfect to ease the reader in. Then to let the reader know that things could get a little crazy I went with a strange beast by Dermot Jelfs, 'Shark Girls', an absurdist tale written in a very self-consciously silly manner. It was funny and strange. From there I tried to alternate between longer and shorter pieces that got progressively darker as the reader ploughed on, ending with a little story to cap things off. Once I was happy with the flow I needed to make it work as a book.
Scrivener also has a formatting option so you can output a complete file that's ready to go. In theory. I found it to be obtuse and counter intuitive. There are people who swear by it, but the effort to get anything looking good didn't seem to be worth it. After days of trying to teach myself the basics I realised that there must be a service that does it all for you. Freelance professionals were my first choice (something I might actually consider in the future) until I remembered that Draft 2 Digital have their own automated process. It was a godsend. I set up the book to be published through their site and took advantage of their compiler. The Word file, with all the stories placed in the order I wanted, and with prominent chapter titles, front and back matter (copyright info and a call to action at the back), was a mess of fonts and sizes but somehow, miraculously it came through the other end looking professional. I went for a minimalist look that fit the anthology. There were other options but nothing seemed to work as well as the plainest possible look. I did tweak it here and there, but the process was simple enough. If you want to keep things simple, and you don't have any specific formatting choices you absolutely need to include then I recommend D2D's magic. There's no option to go in and micro manage every element, and there's not a great deal of flexibility, but for a first time user it was great.
Make sure you include everything you need in your Word file first, that includes author bios, end matter and anything you want up front. Links can be embedded (do this in Word first) so you can direct people to you site or mailing list.
At the end of the process I had a great looking file, except the was one thing missing - a cover. I have no idea at all what I'm doing in photoshop so this was going to be an even bigger hurdle than formatting and I'll tell you all about it next time.
