Thursday, January 22, 2009

Self Publishing

For those of you who haven’t yet read the comments on the Periodical and ISSN blogs, Valya is thinking of starting a journal, and she’s wondering if Wordclay, a free print-on-demand publisher, is the right choice.

Who can blame her? The idea of a print-on-demand periodical is a relatively new concept, even though I’m not sure exactly why. To me at least, it just makes sense to order as many copies of a journal as you need, so you aren’t out hundreds of dollars on unused copies that end up collecting dust in your cramped office.

Still, Valya has questions, and I aim to answer them.

Valya: “You say, ‘You can always pay a small price for the Stock Cover Art and submit artwork with directions for our professional designers.’ What if I want to design my own cover with my own photography? Is there an acceptable format that I can send to you to have printed?

Justin: You can design the complete cover if you are capable of doing so. You can also contract your own designer to lay it out for you. The exact specs for each of our formats are in the FAQs toolbox. The best formats to use when sending the cover would be a layered .psd file or .tiff file, and if possible a PDF of the full cover as well.

eurekaBut unless you’re an experienced designer, I don’t recommend laying the cover out yourself. The whole concept behind Wordclay is DIY publishing through being affordable.

Not only will you devote tons of time to laying out a cover, or perhaps tons of money hiring a designer (and you’ll still have to pay Wordclay a custom quoted fee to use the cover you provide anyway), but often times the smallest formatting error can throw the whole design off for the printers.

For example, you may miss a trim line or you may not leave enough room for the imprint or barcode – what then? Your cover looks only half as good as it could have – that’s what.


This is a copy of a post from: writing, self publishing and book marketing

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