Musings on Photography

My createspace process ran into a hitch getting through the review process on their end.

For some reason they flagged it as bleeding past the edge of the page. I’m suspecting that this is a result of how I had the bleed options set when I generated the PDF. So I wanted to go ahead and order a proof. But for some strange reason, I couldn’t.

I sent email to support, but of course it was the weekend, so that all got delayed. Yesterday when I went to check, suddenly I could order the book - so I did. We’ll see if it’s all messed up when it arrives.

I later got email from createspace saying the problems had been resolved. I’m unclear if this was my mistake or just a glitch on their end. Not a big deal regardless.

I’m looking forward to seeing all these books.

To round out the day, I thought I would try yet another POD publisher - this time CreateSpace. The appealing thing about CreateSpace is that it appeared that I could tweak my InDesign book layout just a smidgen, and then just crank out a PDF and upload it, and be on my way.

It worked out almost that well. First, I had to create a book cover. I started out in InDesign but quickly hit the head-banging threshold. I gave up, and looked at the CreateSpace site again to see if there were any clues. I’m not too proud to look for help. Well, mostly not.

Anyway, CreateSpace had this cool feature that gave me an adjusted template (adjusted for the number of pages) as a .psd file. You download that file, load it into photoshop, and start laying your cover out over the top of the template. When you’re done, you turn off the template layer, have Photoshop save a PDF version, and you’re on your way.

It was a piece of cake; I just dropped the JPG versions of the cover that I’d cranked out for Blurb into the template, added a big black layer to give me color out past the bleed margin, and saved it all both as a PSD (so I can fix any mistakes) and as a PDF (to upload). Sweet.

And then I went, dropped the ISBN that CreateSpace gave me into my copyright page, and cranked out the PDF for the book block. And then uploaded it. Easy Peasy.

And then I submitted the whole thing for review. Presumably they’ll check to make sure I haven’t screwed it all up (I just thought of one possible mistake) and then I’ll be able to order a copy.

Apparently today is ‘International POD Publishers Do Things Which Greatly Annoy Paul Butzi Day”, on which all the POD publishers in the world attempt to provoke me into throwing a stroke by doing stupid things to annoy me. And not one of you warned me. Hmpf.

This morning, after fooling around with various ways to get from an InDesign document to something that can be force-fed into Blurb’s Booksmart software, I sat down to actually attempt to generate something I could order from Booksmart. Today was the day to, at long last, actually order a real printed book from SOMEONE, and for various reasons that someone was going to be Blurb.

It’s easy to get InDesign to render a book as full page jpgs. Well, it’s easy once you know how. Before that, it’s a bit of a mystery. But I’d figured that out, and armed with an InDesign book laid out to the dimensions specified by Blurb, I fired up InDesign and populated a folder with jpgs with names like page01.jpg, etc.

And then I fired up BookSmart. I will give you the complete story, with three part harmony, full orchestration, and a lot of feeling.

I understand why software like Booksmart exists. Really, I do. It exists because InDesign is too complicated, and asking someone to put together a book of their vacation to Epcot Center or Bermuda with InDesign is like asking someone “Will you please run down to the corner mailbox to mail a letter, and oh, by the way, would you mind using my Lockheed C-5a Galaxy strategic airlift jet?” I mean, InDesign is overkill for practically anything. And it’s expensive, too.

But still. People could lay out their books in Word, or Pages, or whatever tool they want, and generate PDFs which they upload. But when this is proposed, of course the techno guys at Blurb cover their ears and cry out in horror. People will get it all wrong. They’ll be mad because their books look like crud. They won’t pay. Blurb will go broke.

And so, what happens is that Blurb hires someone to write a simple layout tool like BookSmart. Limited feature set. Careful limits on what can be done. Templates. Handholding. The techno guys at Blurb no longer cry out in horror and shout “No, don’t do that, you’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” when they watch someone getting ready to upload stuff to Blurb to be printed.

Hey, they even have a (beta) version for the Mac, so I should be pleased, right? Wrong. Booksmart is bad.

My first intimation that my life with BookSmart was not going to be lovey-dovey was when I realized that it was not child’s play to get it to just let me cram pages into a book and plop images onto those pages. Oh, no, it took several abortive efforts before I got to that point. And then, when I had all of those files named ‘page001.jpg’ etc. imported into BookSmart, I had to plop them onto the pages one by one. And if that isn’t bad enough, I had to put up with some moron’s version of drag and drop, where I had to click once on an image to select it, and then click on it and drag it to the page, instead of just click and drag and drop. My carpal’ed out wrists started to protest even with the Apple Mighty Mouse in little plastic shards and the ergonomic mouse installed.

But in the end, I got it all done, and even think I got all the pages in and in the right order. It took me three tries with the cover, because it kept insisting that the ’subtitle’ field had too much text in it even though it was empty. In the end THAT problem turned out to be that the ‘title’ field on the cover had nothing in it but a single space. When I deleted that space, BookSmart stopped complaining. At this point, realizing that this was probably pretty buggy software, I started in praying in earnest.

But I did manage to upload the book to Blurb. And I ordered it, and I even paid the outrageous $10.92 for standard 5 day ground shipping. Hey, Blurb! I could ship a Lockheed C-5a Galaxy strategic airlift jet from where you are to where I am, overnight, for less than that. Be ashamed.

And then, after I successfully navigated through giving them billing and shipping addresses and such, and I’d ordered the book, I went back to BookSmart, to make sure I’d saved my work.

So I hit ‘file/save’ and Booksmart threw up this dialog, and I typed in a name, and BookSmart saved my work. But where, I pondered, had it saved it? It never asked me for a location. So I searched and searched, in vain, trying to find where the hell this worthless steaming pile of offal had saved my work. Because, you know, I wanted to make sure it would appear in my BACKUPS and stuff.

But no, I couldn’t find it. Not even harnessing the Magical Power of Spotlght Searching on my mac could reveal the location, because there were about 27 quadrillion things that came up when I searched for SoFoBoMo2008. So I created a new, empty book. And I saved it with a wildly improbable name that (ahem) made fun of the software developers at blurb in a particularly inappropriate way. And then I searched for THAT using Spotlight.

And I found it, and to my everlasting horror, I discovered where BookSmart had saved my work. Here is a little quiz - when BookSmart saves your work, does it save it in:

1. your Documents folder
2. on your desktop
3. your home directory
4. the BookSmart folder in the systemwide applications folder, which they’re not supposed to do

If you guessed #4, you’re right. That’s what it does. You’ve been warned. When BookSmart saves your work, and it doesn’t get picked up in your backup because no one backs up software they can just reinstall, don’t blame me. Blame the ignorant moron at Blurb who wrote the software. And if that happens to you, and you want a particularly inventive, vulgar, vitriolic curse to level at the morons responsible at Blurb, let me know. I’ve got a real dandy, and it’s only been used once. I’ll give you a special deal.

Now, it’s true that Blurb thoughtfully included a way for you to change this location. But if you’re working on, say, three different books, they all get saved in the new location. So I can’t have my SoFoBoMo 2008 book stored in one folder, along with the VioVio version and the Lulu version and whatever, and then have my Pacific Coast book in another folder entirely. No, that’s not allowed.

Honestly, I thought the software world moved away from this sort of microcephalic horsepucky with Dos 2.0. Apparently not at Blurb.

Much of the photo time I’ve put in this week has been lost to the mind-bending whirl of POD options. Too many places to go to get books printed, too many size options, too many different ways to turn my InDesign book layout into whatever bolus of data each publisher wants uploaded to make the book.

And, naturally, although in my memory I was QUITE careful to pick a page size that matched the trim size of at least one of the options, it’s now abundantly clear that I screwed that bit up royally. And there are no common sizes switching from one outfit to another, at least as far as I can tell.

So now I am faced with adjusting the layout in ways both subtle and not so, to fit the page sizes available in various places, so that I can give each of of them a try. Or at least, right now I want to give several different places a try. Much more of this headbanging and I will surely just punt the entire enterprise and take up collecting the skeletons of small mammals that suffered from rabies instead.

And, as if it wasn’t enough hassle to go and adjust the page size and layout, when I switch to a different page size, I have to go through and generate new versions of the images. So I went through, and added a keyword to every PSD file. It took a long time, because Bridge is a horrible, slow, memory hogging nasty bit of software. And it’s hard to use, too. It’s slow and hard to use on a four core 3GHz Xeon machine with 8 GB of memory. I hate it. It’s slow and I hate it.

Anyway, the reason I was tagging all these files with keywords was to make it easy to generate new versions of the images, scaled to fit various book sizes. Sheesh.

I had this idyllic book printing fantasy thing going on, where I just sort of tweaked a few things, and in a few minutes I had a new version of the book in a different page size. Ha! Shattered dreams. Shattered into a million little jaggy pieces, all of them. Also included in this shattered fantasy thing I had going also included just uploading the PDF and not generating lots of jpgs and loading them into POD software that’s different for each POD vendor.

Fooey.

Gordon McGregor has an interesting post on book design. Gordon, who’s braver than I am, generously shares his previous PDF format book-like efforts, three of them. He’s also got a book recommendation - I have requests for the book he recommends (and the sister volume on type) at the library, so I should have them in hand shortly. Go give Gordon’s blog a visit to see the book titles and his views on them.

In the meantime, I’ve struggled quite a bit with trying to put together a sort of first blush mockup of a book in Adobe InDesign. My struggles have NOT been with InDesign, which takes a bit of learning but is not horrible. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with basic concepts of book design - questions like “What is the proper order of all that stuff at the front of the book?” and “What info is really supposed to go on the copyright page?” and so on.

It didn’t take me long to sit down and order up a pile of books from the library. So far I have examined four:

• Bookworks - Making Books by Hand - Gwenyth Swain.
• New Book Design - Roger Fawcett-Tang
• The Little Book of Layouts - David E. Carter
• Book Design and Production - Pete Masterson

The first book, Bookwords - Making Books By Hand, I requested because I have vague ideas of making extra-special one-off books by printing the pages on my z3100 and then building the pages into a book by hand. Great idea, but this is not the book to get me up to speed for that project. New Book Design I requested hoping it would give me fundamental concepts in book design. Instead, it’s a collection of photos of cover and page spreads for a bunch of modern books. That’s probably great if you’re already up to speed on book design, but it’s not what I wanted. The Little Book of Layouts is not really books at all - it’s all about brochures. Since what I want is help on book specifics, that’s not much help to me. All three of those will go back to the library.

The last book, Book Design and Production, is subtitled A Guide for Authors and Publishers. It’s exactly the sort of book I was looking for. I’ve been learning about ‘front matter’, ‘body’, and ‘back matter’. As I suspected, it turns out there’s a conventional order for everything, and the book has solid information on all of this. In addition, the book is largely oriented toward people who, like me, want to engage in the masochistic process of doing their own book layout using their own computer and some bit of software. There’s what seems to be a very realistic rundown on the various alternatives for software, including Microsoft Word,Pagemaker, Framemaker, Quark Xpress, InDesign, Ventura, Publisher. There’s even a highly enlightening comparison of the same text set with Word, Pagemaker, and InDesign. The difference in appearance between the text set in Word and the text set in InDesign is stunning and really has to be seen to be believed. Let’s just pause here and say that I’m not disappointed that I’ve purchased InDesign.

I liked this book so much that I immediately went to Amazon and purchased a copy. I’m going to want this far longer than the time the library will let me keep it.