Questions & Answers about the Publishing Process

When is a good time to use Microsoft word to lay out my book?Simply put… Never!! To put it another way, Microsoft anything does not work very well with any printing process with the exception of your desktop printer. Bill Gates started off as a computer geek, not a commercial book printer. Word and Word Perfect are both word processing programs. As word processing programs they both do a good job of processing words. Spell check… grammar check… thesaurus… all great tools to help you write a better manuscript. However, when it’s time to turn your manuscript into a book you will be wasting a lot of time and effort trying to make a word processing program act like a page layout program.The primary problem is that a word processing file is a single “living” document. A small move in any part of the document can affect the layout throughout the entire document. Every time a change is made, the entire document “reflows”. This also occurs when you move your document from one computer to another depending to the user’s personal settings. A word document can be converted to a PDF document (a file format that commercial printers can use) but you usually have the same problem in making the conversion. A 256 page word document can all of a sudden turn into a 292 page PDF document. You may struggle for dozens of hours trying to jerry rig your document to “look” like the book layout on your screen, only to find that once you convert the file to PDF for printing, the result is a jumbled mess.

If you really have the urge to design and lay out your book, you’ll need to invest in a page layout program like Quark or PageMaker and learn how to use them. These are fairly expensive programs and not particularly easy for the novice to understand. I know plenty of authors who have gone this way and found the experience to be quite personally rewarding.

However if this doesn’t sound exciting, you can do a little shopping and discover that the price to have your book professionally designed and laid out does not cost as much as buying the layout program. In my opinion, you will be much better off saving the money, time and aggravation and investing it in a marketing program for your book.
My personal favorite designer is Jonathan Gullery, whom I have been working with for over 20 years. He is quite talented, easy to work with and is very reasonably priced. You can get a complete design and layout of a 256 page book for about $250. He will also design a book cover or dust jacket for another $250.
You can visit him at www.budgetbookdesign.com.

If you have a question pertaining to the publishing production process, please feel free to contact me at ron@rjcom.com.

Ron Pramschufer

Ron Pramschufer has been in or around the printing and publishing industry for over 35 years. His experience, including working in the pressroom, bindery, production office and estimating department helped give him a firm foundation to build on when he entered sales and management. He was partners in a small press publishing company in Annapolis, MD in the late seventies and co-invented and marketed two controversial political board games which sold over 100,000 copies in the early eighties. Moving from his home state of Maryland to New York City after his game experience, Ron sold printing services to, primarily, small to mid-sized book publishers for over a decade before founding RJ Communications with an old friend. Ron recognized the potential of the Internet very early as a powerful communications tool. In 1997 he started one of the first printer related websites, www.rjcom.com, which caters to the professional print buyer. This evolved into www.BooksJustBooks.com and more recently www.selfpublishing.com which target the print buying novice, primarily self-publishers. All three sites are still operating successfully and SelfPublishing.com was named as one of Writers Digest’s, 101 Best websites for writers for 2006. Educating the novice print buyer has been a top priority from day one. To help address this issue, Ron co-authored the popular title Publishing Basics- a Guide for the Small Press and Independent Self-Publisher, now in its Third Edition, as well as Publishing Basics for Children’s Books, in its Second Edition. He is the organizer of the monthly Publishing Basics Newsletter where he writes a sometimes controversial Ask Ron column which addresses various aspects of the publishing process. On the same note, he started the Publishing Basics Radio PodCast in 2005 and serves as the show’s host. A wide variety of topics are covered including a very popular series titled, The Truth Behind POD Publishing, where he conducts interviews with a select group of industry insiders. Since its inception, RJ Communications has helped thousands of customers print over 105 million books. Ron is married and has three children. His daughter, Stephanie, teaches second grade and recently self-published her first children’s book in the Oliver the Clownfish series. Matthew, his oldest son, owns a website design business and Erik, the youngest, is enjoying high school.

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