4 Pre-press is the preparation of the complete file, including the cover, according to your printer’s specifications. In most cases the book will be designed in Adobe Indesign, converted to a press quality PDF while the cover as a 300 dpi, CMYK tiff file with ¼ inch bleed.

5 Administration includes filing, backing up digital media, archiving to CD-ROM or DVD, mailing archive disc to client, invoicing, Post office trips, drop off at couriers (if needed), project accounting and general record keeping. Often overlapping with the File delivery service, administration may also include establishing how the author pays for the print run, deposit, balance and shipping costs.

6 File Delivery can involve contacting your printer to arrange for the method of file delivery, either by mailing CD or DVD, or by File Transfer Protocol (FTP), emailing or other method, as well as establishing what file formats they want the book documents sent in. Finally, the actual delivery, either by mail, courier or digital transfer, requiring addresses user IDs and passwords.

7 Modifications and Corrections are inevitable, sometimes even before the proof is returned from the printer, and could involve changing or fixing the cover, color issues, font issues, glaring typographic errors or omissions, or any number of other unforeseen circumstances rising from file anomalies, printer errors, file corruption or most often of all, human error.

8 Image insertions, this is the placing of an image into the body of the book. This assumes digital file supplied by author, as sized 150 to 300 dpi grayscale JPEG, or TIFF, and file coded to correspond to a place in the text in brackets such as in the following example: [chapter3-image13], see following note 9 for how to prepare and mark placement of captions to go along with images.

9 Caption insertions assumes that the caption is already typed and inserted into the body of the book, and noted with the image number and location for that specific point in the body of the text. AS in note 8, above, place the actual caption text in the brackets behind the chapter number and image number as in the following example: [Chapter3-image13 caption: A scene from the Granville Island, circa 1889. Photo Courtesy The City of Vancouver Museum and Archives, used with Permission.]

10 Image scanning and Preparation involves creating grayscale or colour scans of art and photographs, as well as preparing digitally submitted, but not press ready or sized imagery for insertion into the body of the book. For each hardcopy or digital file that requires scanning and/or preparation, the author will need to use a paperclip or other method of fastening a note with the image which pertains to a specific spot in the text. It is best to create an image number for each image, and then note that number in brackets in the actual text with a line above and below the notation to make it easy for the layout designer to locate. Example of a image placement notation: [image 36 goes here].

11 ISBN (International Standards Book Number???) IF you have your own, please send it along with your book’s title and publisher prefix. If you don’t have your own publishing company supplied ISBN, or the publisher or printer you are using isn’t providing you with one, then McAusland Studios can provide you with a an ISBN. Self publishing services such as Partners In Publishing, Trafford and others will be able to provide you with an ISBN if you ask. Many books stores require an ISBN as well as a barcode. Barcodes are often applied to the cover at the time of printing by the printer.

12 Changes to the Printer’s proof are not always required. These changes are not due to mistakes but instead changes in cover or body text for other reasons, often stylistic or content based. McAusland Studios will give a quote on the anticipated cost of changes prior to setting about making any requested modifications to the previously approved and submitted files.

13 Business cards and bookmarks are an excellent promotional tool, on par with an authors own web site as far as effectiveness and cost efficiency goes. While you may have your won printer in mind, the costs noted above are solely for the design and file delivery of either a business card or bookmark. McAusland Studios works closely with a printer in Vancouver, British Columbia which can deliver excellent quality cards and bookmarks with a rapid turn around and right to your door delivery. These cards are full colour glossy on one side, and matte grey scale on the other if desired, with a print run minimum of 1000 cards. Click here for the cost to have a bookmark or business card designed for yourself or book, based on your book, by clicking here. For ground up business card design services, not based on a book’s existing cover and general layout theme, contact us for a quote.

14 JPEG email flyers are an effective way of sending out a notification of your book. Simply send the screen quality, fast loading file as an attachment to everybody on your email list. Alternatively, this file can be created as a PDF and can be printed. Usually, the email flayer is a 6 inch wide by 6 inch tall white image with a picture of your book, a picture of the author and the back cover blurb from the actual book, along with any other text the author submits to be added to the file.

15 Inkjet Posters are designed to be printed from a home based inkjet printer and then posted around your community, mailed to distributors or book stores, the media as a news release, or sent to agents and publishers. These files are usually 150 dpi Adobe Acrobat Format files or PDFs and so are usually a bit too big to send as an attachment to everybody on your email list, especially those on dial-up modems, but, could easily be sent to those who want a copy of the file to print and distribute in other towns and cities. If you have special file size requirements, just let us know and we will accommodate you.

16 eBook screen version of your book. This is basically your entire book, including cover, converted to a screen only quality book. It is designed to be emailed, and sis therefore perfect for sending to media contacts, potential distributors and bookstores instead of sending a precious hardcopy. In addition, you might have friends, family or customers who like to read books on their laptop, and you can therefore either sell this locked version for about half the cost of the print book, burning copies to CD-ROM yourself or simply emailing the book once the person pays you via check, money order or paypal.

17 Basic Authors Web sites are either based on the name of the author, the company the author has set up, or the book’s title. The advantage to setting up an author’s name site is that you might have more than one book or a series of books with different titles and want to maintain one site. The book’s title will always be found by any curious surfer simply by typing in the book’s title, since these web sites make extensive use of key wording and key phrasing. All books designed through McAusland Studios, Partners in Publishing, or other self publishers or printers will also have references within their sites, usually with links to your own site to make it even easier to find and buy your book. Basic author web sites contain the following pages, but can be modified to suit the needs of individual authors: Home Page, Contact Page, Author Biography page, Books Page or Book Store with links to sample chapters and artwork, and a Links page or Preview Page telling your readers what you’re working on. Some authors who do a lot of signings and tours also like to have an Appearances or Calendar page, which has a listing of all the dates and location where he or she can be seen. It is sometimes a good idea to invite site visitors to email the author and be placed on a newsletter or update email list, allowing you to gain direct access to those who want to learn more about you and your books. Updating the author’s website is necessary from time to time, such as when an address change, price change, colander addition or new book is added, in such cases, McAusland Studios charges $40 an hour for these modifications to the site after the site goes live and is approved by the client.

18 Cover Art or Photo Scan and Press-Prep is more complicated and exacting than preparing an interior grayscale image. The files is often massive and unwieldy, demands accurate colour correction, cropping , bleed marks and clean up as well as numerous other fine tuning treatments to make it turn out perfect. Given this careful attention to a cover image, the printing process almost always produces a slightly different end colour than the original art, RGB file or photograph. We make every effort to get your cover as close to the digital PDF proof that we send you as possible.

19 Photography of large format art for your book’s cover is conducted by either hiring a professional studio photographer if the image is very large, glossy, a odd shaped, or involves more than one object, however much of it can be done by a high resolution digital camera. If your image is larger than 9 x 12", it is necessary to photograph it. If you must mail the image to be photographed, please ensure it is sent by registered mail and secured in watertight, shock proof packing materials. It is always advisable to have your artwork photographed locally and send us a high resolution file (300dpi RGB tiff or Photoshop format file at about 120% the size of your intended book cover size).

Return registered postage (or via UPS, Fed Ex or other courier fees) and packing materials for all artwork sent to McAusland Studios will be billed to the client.

The fee of $75 is applied to the first image in a photo session, with all other vaguely similar sized images costing only $25 additional per shot since the session has already been booked and file processing is handled in a batch of images.

20 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) costs a $1.25 per typed page, which can add up, however, only on the rarest occasions is the text from a typewriter or older word processor ever scanned accurately enough to make this proposition any more affordable or time effective. Any speck of ink, pencil mark, liquid paper correction or other blemish on the document sheet being OCRed will register as a illegible graffiti at best, and require some serious attention by the scanner operator and ultimately the author. For this reason, if you have an old manuscript, you might want to look into the cost of getting somebody to retype the entire book into a MS word document prior, proof reading it once and sending it.

Even as effective as OCR is, we will require the author to proof read the entire manuscript and sign off on the text to declare it press ready, as it is guaranteed that the OCR process will mis-scan a word here and there, a word that only the author would truly recognize as an error. We do not read nor edit any book we handle, and if we do see something that looks like an error, we will contact the author to confirm the questionable passage, word or use of punctuation.

21 Ink Maps, based on imagery the author supplies as tracings, pencil roughs, scans from existing materials or other sources can be turned into hand drawn ink maps. The size of the map reference sketch or sample can be whatever works for the placement of the image in the book, however it will be redrawn approximately 8 x 10" in size and shrunk down during scanning to be prepared for the book size, unless the book itself is 9 x 12 or similar.

22 Archiving of files onto CD-ROM or DVD is done at a cost of $10 per disc (book). The archived disc is then removed from the studio and safely stashed away in the event that the authors’ own copy is lost or destroyed, and the author wishes to access the files again for reprints or the creation of another edition through another printer. Your printer will typically store book files as well, but over time, these files may become misplaced or erased. We highly recommend archiving and backing up your book files should you choose to store them yourself, see note 23 below.

23 Having a CD-Rom or DVD of your book files sent to you for archiving is wise. You may wish to take your files to another designer or printer, or simply duplicate it for security. While McAusland Studios does maintain the files during the work phase of a book project, a book, especially the cover, takes up a huge amount of space on a computer’s hard drive, and so must be deleted after a month or two to make room for new projects. While McAusland Studios does back up files locally, a single archive location is no precaution against fire, theft or damage to a single disc. See note 22 if you would like the designers to maintain an additional archive of your book files after the project is completed.

The above prices are in ‘on-par’ Canadian or US dollars. If you are living outside of Canada, please use American equivalent currency, while Canadians please use Canadian dollars. Make all checks payable to William McAusland.

The above prices are for standard paperback books, as well as saddle stitched books. We are looking into a wide range of hard cover and other formats, as well as books which include CD-ROM pockets. After making initial contact with us, and establishing your book design needs, please print off and check all the boxes and amounts which apply to your book project, (see page 5 below) including the number of interior photos and captions, (if any) illustration, photography, or scanning requirements if applicable, finally, total the sheet and send it with your 50% deposit to us at the address below. Otherwise, email us and let us know what your requirements are and we can email you a price breakdown and quote form stating the total amount.

Digital text for your book, preferably in MS Word but email us to ask about other acceptable program formats, such as sending each chapter in the body of an email for Mac users. If you have a handwritten book, or a manuscript typed on old, faded, correction heavy sheets, then it is advisable to hire a typist to put your work into a digital file.

Chapters identified within the manuscript, with the chapter’s title and or number clearly marked as you want it to appear in the final book. Place two or more lines above and below the new chapter title or number so our layout person can easily locate it when scrolling through your files and know where to start the next chapter.

Make sure there are NO Headers or Footers or Page Numbers inserted in the manuscript pages, as these will be added later in the page layout program. If you’ve used OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to create your file, then please go through the document to remove every occurrence of the chapter title header and page number from the earlier printed version, as these will end up as part of the book and due to the changes in page size, font size and layout may end up in the middle of a page instead of at the top. Our layout person will set the proper chapter titles in the book layout program, along with the automatic page numbering.

If your manuscript file requires your attention, we will identify the problem area and send it back to you for your review and correction prior to commencing book layout. The most common errors we have seen in the dozens of books we have done so far are headers (and footers) embedded in the pages, also, an index in the back of the book which does not reflect the newly formatted and updated book pagation and therefore needs to be re-done by the author, page by page. Another common problem with files is faulty OCR scanning which have caused enormous difficulties, and would require the author going over the manuscript again before once more sending it to us.

In short, we will not perform any editorial or corrective work to a book’s text, as for one, we would have no idea of knowing if a version of a word, phrase or punctuation was meant to be a certain way or not, secondly, we can’t possibly read all the books we are working on, and are not editors or proof readers ourselves. If you require an editor, check out our Self Publishers Links page here.

Additional Texts supplied: Make sure you have all your other, non-chapter based text documents ready to go and supplied along with your book. This includes your back copy blurb or sell copy, your front cover teaser, any testimonials for inside the book or on the back cover, etc. Here are examples of what you might need for your book….

About the Author (and Artist)

Advertisement for a previous book

Contact Info Your email and web address

Is this the book’s first printing? if not, who else published it?

Author’s Photo is also very important and must be mentioned here. Send us a photo to scan (or a 300 dpi tiff or jpeg) that we can crop and apply to the bio or back cover of your book

Cover image: Do you have a cover image already to send? If you have a digital file, it will need to be a 300 dpi tiff or Photoshop file, in either CMYK or RBG colour format, or Grayscale if that’s how you want it to look. If you are supplying the image, make sure it is larger than the actual book size by about a quarter inch all the way around to facilitate full bleed (right off the edge of the paper and trimmed before the book is assembled).

Interior Images: for either full colour or grayscale images, supply press ready 150 to 300 dpi tiffs, sized to how you want them to be printed. If you want McAusland studios to scan and prepare files, see note 8, 9 and 10, above on page 2.

Don’t have a printer or self publishing service lined up? Tell us about your project and let us recommend a suitable match for your book. Some authors are ready to set up their own small press and tackle the self publishing jungle on their own as an independent, single or limited title publisher, while others need or simply enjoy the help of others. If you feel like you need some guidance or marketing partners in your self publishing enterprise, we work with several companies who may be of use to you. Visit our Links Page to explore the possibilities.

Questions? Email any time or call (Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm Pacific Time)