my book of weird email invitations is finally in print! so you don’t get your expectation
my book of weird email invitations is finally in print! so you don’t get your expectations up it’s basically just a collection of email invitations I have sent to my social mailing list, but lovingly typeset in LaTeX with bizarre annotations and occasional cartoons and a slightly apothecarial 1920s-inspired hand-drawn cover.sorry the shipping costs more than the book(conversely, I priced the book below the shipping!)publishing infodump“Publishing” my first “book” was a truly non-herculean effort that ran an inimitable week in the creating and three months in the waiting!The inside is mostly text, plus a few simple line drawings that did not require high-quality printing. I was looking for an economical softcover B&W book between 4"x6" and 5"x7", with a page minimum less than 50, and no order minimum. I did the cover design and interior layout myself (LaTeX never ceases to be useful!), so I didn’t need any additional design or advertisement services. I didn’t immediately want an ISBN (because let’s be real, only my friends are going to buy this), but also didn’t want to rule out that option in the future. I would have loved a matte cover, but couldn’t find a suitable PoD printing service that offered matte softcovers.This Medium post comparing several small-batch PoD printers was extremely informative. I researched just about every custom print service there is out there, and ended up going with Lulu primarily because they were the only PoD service offering a low-cost B&W option smaller than 5"x7". My main issue was spine misalignment, as my 48-page book had a spine 0.09" wide, which was (understandably) too close to the margin of alignment error to be usable. I ended up scrapping the spine design entirely in the third and final proof run. I thought Lulu’s turnaround time was a little slow, as it took close to 3 weeks to receive each run, but their customer service is fantastic and they replaced my first two botched runs at no cost.If I publish any visually oriented content in the future (a photo book or glamour magazine of my cat is definitely on the table), I will likely go with Blurb. Their sample print pack has great photo quality and they seem to offer a good range of formats and quality for presenting different types of visual content. -- source link
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