Have you published a book?

[X-ray]

Alright dudes and dudettes...

I want to know if you've published a book. If so, are there any tips you can give me: good and bad experiences, agents and publishers to avoid etc.
Also if you have self-published (print on demand) what were the costs?

I appreciate any tips. I've got a manuscript here (of a forensic flavour) that is about 70% done. One way or another it is going to result in a publication of about 500 pages.
And like any new 'parent' I want only the best for my kid  ;-)

[blobrana]

hum,
my obvious tip:

And like for any new 'patent' you would want to send the manuscript to yourself in a sealed and dated envelope...
for copyright purposes...(dont open)  :-)

[X-ray]

@ Blobzie:

That's good advice for a work of fiction, yes.
However this is non-fiction, based on research that I have already completed. The ethics, X-ray and trauma clearances are all filed in my name.

You've just made me think of something: Edited (asked in PM)

[GadgetMaster]

I don't know if it's any use to you but have you seen http://www.lulu.com. It's supposed to get you self published at minimal or no cost. They make money by taking a portion of the sales. At least thats the impression I got from the breif explanation I was given.

I have no idea if it is any good as I have no experience with it myself.

[X-ray]

@ Gadget

Thanks for the link.

[whabang]

X-ray wrote:
I want to know if you've published a book.

Alas, no; I've never gotten past the first fifty pages. :-(

[T_Bone]

I helped someone publish a book a few years ago. A professor at NC State, he needed help with a math book he wanted to write, he was fluent in Xfig and needed a linux machine and help with linux as he knows xfig and latex but nothing else. Later on he had problems with the publisher who requires everything in postscript, but for some reason was having problems with the .ps files we gave them. Apparently Adobe Acrobat Distiller is buggy as hell and if using ghostscript to create the files Distiller pukes on some of them.

I had to go through about 500 pages, page by page, print and read every single ghostscript file with Distiller, and reedit any page distiller couldn't render correctly.

Oh yea, another thing we ran into... just because your OS includes a certain font or you downloaded it for free somewhere, doesn't mean you can use it in a book. That was our fault, but the publisher caught it. They offered us a typesetting service (basically they offered to rerender everything in a commercial font) but it was hugely expensive compared to just giving them the .ps files and having them print and bind them.

I'm using the term "publisher" loosely, basically they were a printing service.

[X-ray]

@ T-Bone

Thanks, man, that is exactly the sort of thing I'm wanting to find out. A lot of the straight printing services seem to have software that runs your text through an automated reformatter and there is very little human formatting going on. That's also the disadvantage of some of the print-on-demand services. I might have to shell out more to avoid problems like that. So far the online research I have done says that I can submit electronic texts in Word format (although there is a large variety of requirements, such as whether captions appear in the text or sequentially in a stand-alone file). The images I have in PSD format, unflattened (in case they don't like the label font or size). I am not worried about those images because I can just run them through a batch convert if there is a format issue). What I am worried about is if they want to reduce colours, convert some isolated pics to B&W, over-edit the text so it loses its spirit or cut corners in some other ways. I suppose what it amounts to is I'll have to pay a lot for flexibility and getting it how I want it.