When I saw the uproar over Apple iBooks Author, I was all ready to get pissed off. Then I looked at the product page in the App store, and saw it was free. I looked some more, and realized that it wasn’t an app that I could realistically use, anyway.
Here is where I am left cold: since it is a free app, I am neither surprised nor especially dismayed that Apple will not allow its product to be sold outside of iBooks. The program reminds me of Booksmart by Blurb, which kindly gives us a handy free program for arranging our books…and then tells us to upload it straight to Blurb and nowhere else.
Furthermore, as a writer who is overwhelmingly preoccupied with putting the correct words in the correct order on the correct pages in order to convey the correct ideas, iBooks Author isn’t of any use to me. I don’t use graphics in my novels (or at least not very many of them and not in a very specific layout), or any interactive or other enhanced material, so I’m not into making the types of books that are the focus of Apple’s new authoring program. Also, I don’t have an iPad, so I couldn’t preview my books or purchase similar content from other authors.
Which does not mean I should not be concerned on behalf of other writers, of course. There are a lot of people who would like to use multimedia in their content, and who could benefit from iBooks Author and are accordingly dismayed that they can’t sell their content outside of the iBooks store. And then I say again: it’s a free app. Programs like Apple Pages, or Microsoft Word, are not free, and their end products are not restricted to a particular retailer. Now, if Apple were charging users $50 for an app with similar end user terms, then that would be a different matter. However, if you want to create the type of multimedia ebook that can be sold in iBooks, but also have it available to sell through different retailers…then Apple isn’t ready to help you. Not just yet. As it currently stands, iBooks Author can be understood as part of the closed system of iBooks. Apple is interested in procuring new content to sell to iPad users, so they are offering potential authors a tool to create that content. Apple’s monopoly on selling that content is the price the authors pay for using the tool.
There is still an argument, I’m sure, that Apple is behaving itself very badly in this, and I’m willing to have that conversation, but the topic is tangential to my main point, which is that the controversy simply reminded me of the striking paucity of book-making software that I can actually use.
This is not to say that there isn’t a variety of software available for writers. There’s plenty. Look up “distraction-free writing app” in Google and take a gander. For putting a simple, all-text novel or memoir into print, however, writers spend a lot of time asking each other for advice on how to turn a manuscript into a sale-ready file, because we don’t have a go-to product.
For ebooks, it’s not bad. If you have Scrivener, you can compile a usable ePub. I won’t say any more, lest I sound like they’re paying me for endorsements. They’re not. To prepare a file for dead-tree edition is another matter. I have recently heard the nice people at L&L say something about using the PDF compile feature to make an interior for CreateSpace, so I guess that’s something and I’ll have to check it out.
Even if that’s outside of my skill set, making a printable text interior is doable. Use either Pages or Word, set the page size, make sure everything is in order, save as PDF. There. Done.
It still leaves the cover.
I have looked all over the Mac store, I have Googled extensively, and honestly, there are not a lot of options for creating print-ready book covers. POD sellers such as Lulu and CreateSpace include free cover templates in their services, and I have made use of them, but in my case, that means my debut novel has two different covers in paperback, neither of which looks much like the ebook cover. We can hire cover designers, but then there are still independent authors like me who carry independent to arguably unhealthy levels and would like to have the option of designing our own covers from the ground up.
The only option I found for this is Book Cover Pro, which costs $97 for the standard version and requires you to download any graphics you might like to use from their website before you can apply them to your designs. This inefficiency keeps the download size to a reasonable level, but it also means that the free trial cannot include their backgrounds and other helpful graphic files. It includes a barcode utility, which is helpful, but Lulu and CreateSpace apply their own barcode anyway. Book Cover Pro is basically a $97 layout tool that requires all graphical rendering to be accomplished outside of the program.
Before you start making noises about Adobe InDesign, please note that it is the software equivalent of using a tank to kill squirrels. I don’t need anything nearly that powerful, and I can’t justify spending over $1000 on a program that I’ll probably use to make a modest handful of book covers over its lifetime. I’m not the layout artist for Vogue, here, I’m just a self-publisher who wants her novels to look decent in print.
However, I have found that Pixelmator gets the job done in cover design, including the graphical rendering, and I’ve already bought it for a lot less than $97. The procedure is this: generate a cover template from Lulu or CreateSpace, open it in Pixelmator or similar program, follow the template’s instructions while doing your artistic thing, and save as PDF. There’s a book cover.
Would it be so much to ask to be able to take care of both these aspects in a single program, though? It wouldn’t even need to be a really complex program; for writers like me, the interior would mainly be a bunch of copy-pasted text with chapter headings and a table of contents. Would it really be so difficult to put that in the same program as the cover layout? And not make it prohibitively expensive?
The point is that since self-publishing is attracting so many new people, there would be lots of demand for this type of program. If such an app exists, and I don’t know about it, then most other self-publishers probably don’t know about it either, and if it’s not well-known, then someone has dropped the ball. We’re not exactly organized, but we’re not taciturn on social media, either. If such an app exists, then it should be at least as well-known as Scrivener. If it doesn’t exist, then it should.
#1 by Lee (in Limbo) Edward McIlmoyle on January 28, 2012 - 3:36 PM
For Windows users who haven’t obtained a copy of Scrivener for Windows yet, I humbly recommend yWriter5, a free application which did plenty of good things for me before I moved all of my fiction writing tasks to my sister’s donated PowerBook, on which I run Scrivener because it’s a little smoother to operate and has all of those compile abilities. I haven’t wrung out Scriv’s PDF making to test its printability, but I severely love its other compile features. If only they’d let us import our own files at Smashwords. I won’t even let them publish an RTF any more, after seeing what Meatgrinder did to my first book.
As for cover art, I feel like I don’t really have the answer you want, because I use the full Adobe Creative Suite in my capacity as a professional graphic designer. I even laid out The Bride of War for print in InDesign (Word was giving me serious headaches) and I design all of my covers in Illustrator (I suppose I could do that in InDesign, too, but I have a lot more control in Illustrator). So I think that disqualifies me from offering suggestions, except to say, if it’s print-ready graphics you need, think about getting the tank. That’s not a squirrel you’re aiming at; it’s a dinosaur. Print, as I’m sure you’ve learned to your chagrin, shows off all of the miniscule flaws in your design file like nothing else can. As my sister likes to say, ‘Go Big or Go Home’.
Hmmn, I wonder if that should tell me something about my sister?
I WILL concede that having to learn how to operate Adobe products with proficiency is an extremely daunting task. there are applications in that suite that are still flummoxing me. But nothing gives you more control or offers you more tools. If I had one super power, I’d choose psychic implant, so I could teach all of my design-oriented friends how to run Illustrator, and they’d never have to resort to templates or training wheel software ever again.
And yeah, iBooks Author is severely misleading software; not really meant for writers at all. If they were serious, they’d try making an app to compete with Scrivener, but I don’t suppose they need to.
Sorry for rambling. Shutting up now.
#2 by alysonmiers on January 28, 2012 - 3:59 PM
I haven’t really had a chance to see how print shows off all the minuscule mistakes, since I haven’t been able to use my own design in print. I would’ve needed much bigger-resolution graphics than I had available to use my own design at either of the POD sellers that I use, so instead I used their templates. Why I only had low-res graphics to use is a bigger issue than my available rendering software. The point is, any mistakes I see on my printed covers are the POD providers’ mistakes, not mine.
Although in the future, I won’t have that excuse, because now I know how to use a blank cover template in a rendering program. So then, all the mistakes that show up in print will be on my head.
The kind of program I’d like to see would be similar to Booksmart by Blurb, but focused less on interior layout (it would be almost entirely text, and in straightforward paragraphs) and open to all vendors, in which case it wouldn’t be a free app.
I haven’t really tried printability, either, on a Scriv-compiled PDF, but it did make a perfectly usable e-copy to hand out to advance readers. I find Scriv compiling such a delicate operation that I’m frankly terrified to try something as complex as a print-ready interior, but the Lit & Latte guys are now saying it’s doable. Perhaps I’ll try that with my second novel, since it’s a great deal shorter and simpler than the first.