Journal mcgrew's Journal: Odds and Ends 9
Getting Nobots actually in print is almost as much work as writing it was. I guess I'm a publishing company now.
First I had to register the copyright in case I decide to sue somebody. Thirty five bucks.
Then I need an ISBN. One for $125 or ten for $250. I bought ten, knowing I'd need at least three; one for Nobots, one for the Paxil Diaries, and one for the new book that I wish someone would suggest a title for, "Whores in Space" doesn't seem to work for me.
It turns out you need an ISBN for each version; one for hardcover, one for paperback, one for e-pub, one for PDF... sheesh.
And I spent another $25 for a bar code for the first book. I wonder if there's an open source bar code writer? Anybody know?
So they email the ISBNs to me, now I have to attach the title, contents, and cover to the ISBN... damn. Finished the front cover last night, but I still have to finish the copyright page and attach it and the table of contents to the book without changing page numbers, so I'll need to stitch two PDFs together. Damn, how do I do that without sending dead presidents to adobe? I've already blown over three hundred bucks.
So I'm looking at other books' copyright pages for examples, and hmmm... Public email address for someone wanting to rent it commercially... Fuck it, I spent another fifteen bucks to buy mcgrewbooks.com. I posted the cover of Nobots there with a "coming soon".
It really is. I hope...
Go with the obvious... (Score:2)
Mars Needs Women
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I wouldn't want it to be confused with this. [wikipedia.org]
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Venus Transit Mars.
Useful programs (Score:1)
My general strategy for performing simple tasks like generating a barcode or merging PDF files is to just do a search on my distro's package manager and there's usually a tool to do what I want (although it sometimes takes a bit of guesswork to figure out what it would be called). I don't remember what I used last time I needed to generate a (non-QR) barcode, but Debian only has one package simply named "barcode" which can probably generate whatever type of barcodes you need (also, there's tons of websites
pdftk (Score:2)
Where in1.pdf and in2.pdf are your input filenames and out1.pdf is your output filename and not at all the same name as either input file.
Their handy-dandy examples should tell you everything you need to know about all the ways you probably won't use the tool, but close enough that you can figure out how it works. I've never tried the (free) windows version (or the paid one), but we use the (free) linux version at work, and it's in Debian.
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Thanks, I'm running kubuntu on one of the towers, I'll try it. But I found that Lulu will let you upload two PDFs, so I'll see what it looks like when I get the galley proof I ordered today (their interface is abysmal). The PDF they showed from combining the two didn't look too good, we'll see. If the galley proof sucks (another $20) I'll try your method.
I'll second that endorsement (Score:2)
A few ideas (Score:2)
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by bar code generator, but is this what you're looking for? http://www.barcode-generator.org/ [barcode-generator.org]
For a title name, how about "Star Drops"?
For adding the copywrite, you don't have to change the page numbers if you added as Roman Numerals (I.E. i,ii,iii,iv etc.). I've seen than in quite a few books. That way you can keep your page numbers the same and still be able to add more before the table of contents.
Do you want to merge, add to, create PDFs? I have Adobe software that all
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That link might work, I'm not sure but thanks. And thanks for the offer but I found something that worked ok, now if that damned galley proof would show up...
Thanks for reading and thanks for helping!