[IAEP] [FM Discuss] E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child [Paperback] is on Amazon.com

[James Simmons]

John,

I may do a blog post on that subject if I can remember my login.  It's
pretty simple though.  You use OBJAVI 2 to create your PDF in the size you
want, using your style sheet.  The size we call Crown Quarto is one of the
choices, but they call it something else.  The size they push is the 6" x
9" format, which OBJAVI calls USTRADE.  So you submit this PDF.  On books
with 300 or more pages you might need to use a larger "gutter" than OBJAVI
will give you by default, so you can put 10 in the "gutter" option to make
the gutter 10mm wider.  I only needed to do this for a USTRADE book I did.
 My Crown Quarto titles were fine with the default.

Now if this PDF has illustrations CS will complain that they are under 300
DPI.  If the pictures are diagrams, screen grabs, or photos of objects it
might be safe to ignore these warnings.  If there are photos of people you
might have a problem.  The only way to know is to get a proof copy and see.
 A proof copy might cost 4.50 US plus shipping, which might be another $5
or more if you're in a hurry.

If it turns out you need 300 DPI pictures you'll need to use Open Office
and one of CS's template files to make your book instead of Booki.  I
discovered when I used copy and paste to get my Booki pages into the
template that all my italics disappeared and had to be put back by hand.
 This seems to be an Open Office issue.

For your cover design you can submit a PDF (Inkscape has a wizard for
creating a wraparound cover with the correct dimensions) but the way I did
it was to use the cover wizard CS provides.

The cover wizard is an AJAX app that walks you through making a cover.
 There are many cover designs to choose from, all named after trees.  The
one I chose is called The Palms, and it prompts you for a front cover image
and a back cover image and lets you specify what you want printed on the
spine and what colors to use.  It will tell you the dimension of the image,
which MUST be 300 DPI or more.  So I used The GIMP to make my front and
back cover images.  I used a free font from FontSquirrel called ChunkFive
for the title.  There are some good articles on designing covers, etc. on
the CS website.  They suggested using a Display font for the title, because
these are designed to be rendered in large sizes and the fonts you already
have are not.

Designing your own book cover with The GIMP can be fun, but if you like you
can pay to have it designed by a professional.  You can pay to have the
inside pages formatted too.

By all means get some color on the cover, because it is much too expensive
to have color on the inside pages.  Books are priced by the page count.  It
is the same price no matter what page size you use.  They push 6x9 because
that is an easy size to distribute, but you can use larger pages and save
money.  Color pages cost four times as much as B/W pages because each page
has to be printed four times with different colored inks.  If you have one
interior page that needs color the whole book needs to be printed that way.
 So color pages only make sense for children's books where every page has a
color picture or some decoration.  There is no extra charge for a color
cover, though, so get a nice photo on there if you can.

You can do B/W on cream colored pages instead of white pages.  I don't know
what that costs.

When you set up the book you can get a free ISBN number, use one you
already have, or pay to get one using your own imprint.  What I think this
means is that if you think there is some kind of stigma to having your book
published by Create Space you can pay for an ISBN and list the publisher as
a different name.

CS will calculate what your book costs to print and give you a minimum
price.  You can charge whatever you like above that. Your royalties will
depend on where you publish the book.  CS will give you a "Store" page on
their own site for selling the book, and you will get MUCH higher royalties
selling it there than you do on Amazon.  Of course actually getting people
to see that page is your problem.  CS will also submit your book to be
listed on Amazon.com in the U.S. only.  To get it listed elsewhere you can
pay a one time charge of $25 to get the book listed in catalogs used by
bookstores.  Without this listing you have no hope of selling your book on
other sites or bookstores.  With it you have no guarantee.  It takes awhile
to get listed from what I've heard.  I have not bothered to do this for my
books.  I might do it for *one* book as an experiment.

James Simmons


On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 11:22 AM, John Curwood <
marketing at lovinglearning.co.nz> wrote:

> **
> After reading your post yesterday, I just had to go onto Amazon and check
> it out. It was very cool when my search listed it (and the ebook) in the
> search results. What was the process like to the the books into print form
> on Create Space?
>
> Cheers,
>
> John
>
>
> On 04/03/12 03:29, James Simmons wrote:
>
> E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child
> [Paperback] is now on Amazon.com, again only the U.S. site. Outside the
> U.S. you should be able to order directly from Create Space.
>
> Eventually Amazon will have *Search Inside The Book* working for this
> title and you'll be able to appreciate all the great artwork done by Oceana
> Rain Fields. This art did not survive translation to Kindle format. It
> looked terrible there, so I had to remove it. Even in B/W it really adds
> something to this printed edition.
>
> If the idea of having a really attractive printed book that explains
> everything about e-books, including how to make them, seems odd to you then
> you really should read the book!
>
>  The URL is:
>
>
> http://www.amazon.com/E-Book-Enlightenment-Reading-Leading-Laptop/dp/1470123223/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330784346&sr=1-14
>
>  James Simmons
>
>
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