A Question for Fellow Writers About Book Publishing

innerspaceboy · 08-14-2022, 10:06 AM

I'm looking for some expert advice from authors who have published through professional publishers outside "The Big Three." I'm hopeful someone here will have some valuable insight to impart.

I recently self-published a book on my music writings to Google Books. Amazon was unable to publish it due to its length, (details below).

I'm considering print publication through a promising publisher in my city. The company was founded by the same fellow who founded a prestigious national atheist/secular freethought organization headquartered in my city of which I am an active member, and they've published socially-progressive works by authors like Isaac Asimov. This aligns well with my writings about the free and open culture movements so it sounded like a good potential match. I've authored a formal proposal satisfying all of their requirements but have not submitted it yet.

My concern is that there are numerous significant hurdles I would have to face to go to print. I'll enumerate them below as succinctly as I'm able.

1. The book is 1,715 5" x 8" pages. This was too long for Amazon to print in either a single physical volume as well as in an ebook due to technical specifications for epub. I'd have to see if the regional print publisher could do it, or if they'd break it up into a multi-volume box set, which would require redesigning the cover layouts. If so, I would prefer to return to the designer who produced the original cover layout as he really understood my vision. Hopefully the publisher would honor that.

2. The PDF has a minor anomaly. When I prepared the working document there were a handful of blank numbered pages as a result of images re-flowing with the text. I removed the numbered blank pages from the exported PDF to ensure that no other images moved out of place. Consequently, those page numbers are absent from the PDF. If the print publisher wished to correct this, or to resize the pages, I would have to provide the working LibreOffice Writer document to tidy up and to repopulate the TOC. This could potentially introduce a flood of new errors with the image re-flow and it would have to be re-proofed from scratch.

3. A few images in the book were sourced from the web and were included with articles for the purpose of commentary/criticism. I'd have to make sure that these constitute Fair Use.

4. My book incorporates numerous web links for referenced content. It appears that the publisher also publishes digitally to all major platforms, but I was not happy with the compromised layout when I exported an epub from my working document, so I'd hope they would honor my request to electronically distribute in the PDF format. Also, my research revealed that Amazon rejects ebooks containing html as there is the potential for them to contain links to malicious websites/viruses. If that's true, my book would again not be publishable through Amazon.

I'd also have to see whether the print publisher would require that I retract my Google Book version for them to host their own copy via their official distribution channels. That's not a problem, just something I'll need to address.

What are your thoughts? These are serious and labor-intensive concerns. I also hope that I wouldn't have to compromise my creative control over the work, but that would likely be a question for the publisher's staff if and when my proposal is accepted.

I'd really appreciate any insight the community here can offer. Writing the book was the most complex undertaking of my life and I'm concerned that a print edition would be too much for me to handle. And I'm not sure how my commitment to utilizing free and open source software to author the working document would be received by a professional publisher who may not be directly familiar with the software.

What do you think? Thanks for any wisdom you can share!