Publishing Your First Book
Writing a book about the Bitcoin industry has been on my list of things to work on for a while now, and during the holiday break at the tail-end of 2016 I finally had a chance to sit down and really start putting it together.
Before I got started, I had a couple of goals:
- It needed to be free to read digitally, because I was more interested in propagating information than making a profit. At the same time, I wanted to have a print edition that I could distribute to industry folks and friends of the company.
- It needed to be easy to update, because a lot of the data would be changing quickly.
- It needed to look nice, because the subject matter was pretty esoteric.
Drafting the Manuscript
As with all my writing, my drafts were all composed inside Sublime Text, a lightweight code editor that I would argue is one of the best in the world.
A lot of professionals swear by Scrivener, but I preferred something that was light on features and allowed me to add tools only as I needed them. Sublime is not particularly adept at managing manuscripts out of the box, but my book was short enough that I didn’t need a lot of writing tools to begin with. For the handful of aids I did need (WordCount and Pandoc, for example), Sublime packs a decent plugin library.
I didn’t know it at the time, but writing in Markdown format on Sublime Text would have some interesting implications on the rest of my publishing workflow.
Building the Layout
Perhaps due to my art school background, it was important to me that the book had a fixed layout, as opposed to the free-flowing text of your average ebook. I did a lot of freelance book design work back in the day, so I had some familiarity with Pagemaker and InDesign. I wasn’t particularly enthused with having to relearn skills from over a decade ago, but after a quick look around there didn’t appear to be any easier apps that could give me the control I wanted.
To get started on the layout, I had to figure out how to import the eleven chapters already written in Markdown format into InDesign, which I eventually accomplished by following this nifty tutorial. One of the most important considerations for managing manuscripts for typesetting is making sure your text files are hot-linked, which enables the authors and editors to continue working on the text while the designer is working on the layouts. If you set things up correctly, each new text update, be it a new chapter or a misspelled word, just gets automatically integrated into the layout without the designer having to reimport every file.
In my case, I was both the author and the book designer, and I’ll admit that I wasn’t disciplined enough to stop myself from performing manuscript-level edits directly in the layout file, which breaks the production chain. (One chapter in particular was authored completely inside InDesign, cowboy-style.)
If I weren’t also my own editor, I’d have been really frustrated working with myself.
Photos and Graphics
Most of the photos Bloom uses in its branding materials are sourced from the Creative Commons collection in Flickr, and I did the same with the images in my book, taking care to add proper attribution where needed.
All of the graphics were designed in Adobe Illustrator, and have existed in various forms since I first started making presentations about Bitcoin back in 2015. My Illustrator workspace reflects my own scatter-brained, amateur approach to building the book. I kept all the versions of my graphics in a single file, just grouped by artboard.
If I were to do this more professionally I would have created Symbol libraries to make it easier to reuse each asset, and then saved separate Illustrator files for each distinct graphic … and maybe I still will (for the 2018 edition!)
Print on Demand
I decided pretty early on that the book dimensions were going to need to be 4:3, which ensured that it would look consistent on landscape devices (i.e., laptops and tablets). In print, this translated to 8" by 6", like a mini coffee table book, which I figured would be nice and unimposing. It was important to me that it looked like an easy read, and size and heft have a lot to do with the way people perceive that.
With my layout about 80% done, I spent some time looking at various print-on-demand services online. Nearly all of them force you to choose from one of a handful of pre-defined book sizes, and I didn’t want to compromise on that.
I eventually settled on Peecho, primarily because they could cut to any size, and had a really straightforward ecommerce workflow. (Depending on your print requirements and sales goals, I recommend checking out more mass-market providers like CreateSpace or Lulu.)
I’ve been pretty satisfied with Peecho’s output, and that’s never happened to me with a print bureau on the first attempt before. Typically, it takes one or two proofs before the output begins to match what you’re looking for. The idea that I could just upload a PDF of any dimension to them, and they would somehow figure out how to build a perfect-bound book from it is pretty damned impressive.
Ebook Conversion
Unfortunately, because I had chosen to go with a fixed layout, there would be no way to make the book work on phones without reflowing the entire text. I didn’t like the idea of maintaining two differently-sized fixed layouts of the book, so I caved and went with a dynamic ebook layout for small devices.
Essentially, this meant designing it for Kindle. The decision to write in Markdown paid off here because Kindle books are really just long HTML documents with a handful of custom tags. It meant that I could export my Markdown from Sublime Text directly into HTML, and only make a few minor adjustments before it was ebook-ready. If I had used something more traditional like Microsoft Word, formatting issues would have been a lot more likely.
The hardware limitations of the Kindle did mean that I had to make the painful decision to remove most of the photography from the book, since it would just be distracting. I did spend some time creating grayscale versions of the graphics though.
Covers
In case you aren’t keeping score, I was now maintaining three distinct editions of my book: a PDF version meant for screens, a PDF version meant for printing, and a grayscale version for the Kindle.
The two PDF versions were similar but not 100% the same. The screen version didn’t need high-resolution images and thus could withstand a bit of compression. Meanwhile, the print version needed a resolution of at least 300 dpi for its images, which had a significant effect on the file size. InDesign helpfully allows you to save presets for multiple distribution scenarios so it was easy to repeat once you had set it up.
The differences in resolution and dimensions also meant I had to render three versions of the cover. Additionally, only the print version had a back cover, which needed to be designed separately.
(In case you’re wondering, the cover art is an image of the Monkey Head Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope, mirrored and merged with a QR code pattern.)
Pricing
Both Peecho and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing allow the author to define a price for their book. In both cases, there’s a minimum price you must charge, which covers the cost of printing and distribution. Amazon helpfully suggests a price for your book based on others in similar categories, and I immediately accepted it.
I’m not an expert at ebook pricing, and neither did I care enough to learn.
In my mind, the best outcome of this entire exercise was if enough people read the book and used it as a basis for their own endeavors, or perhaps as a way to improve their processes. It’s also a great talking point at conferences and events, and certainly serves to document what the industry has achieved at this point in time. Whether or not I make a few bucks seemed unimportant, if those goals are achieved.
Post Script
It’s now been a year since I wrote and published Reinventing Remittances with Bitcoin, and I’ve carted copies of it along with me to conferences from SF to London to Mumbai since then. (It’ll always be free to download from here.)
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the entire process was how short the time was. From writing my first sentence in my text editor to having a final print edition delivered to my apartment, it was barely 7 weeks worth of effort. I can’t say it was particularly hard either. Technology has made everything so much simpler now, especially compared to when I was first doing design work in the late 90’s.
I’ve recently gone through this whole book design process again, for a new publication that we’ll be releasing quite soon, and I’m pretty proud of the final outcome. This one won’t be for sale though ;)
