Just out of interest, how did you stitch the contributions together and adjust things like the line spacing and inverted commas? I would probably have done the latter by editing each individual contribution in Word, then the former by loading them all into the same Word document and adjusting the style's "paragraph" setting to be double-spaced. If push came to shove, I might even resort to using Word macros or even a little VB (Visual Basic) program to do the job for me.

(Oops, I think I just volunteered myself to do any editing.)


Alex

Oh good. That's the editing sorted... well done Alex.

Most of the contributions came to me in rtf files, a couple in word. They were nearly all double lined, and were in the setting and times that was required. I transferred all to single spacing and put into one word document and brought about manually a common style with inverted commas and double spacing.

I then set up the contents pages and the section divisions adding in an introduction, end notes and biographical details at the end.

I then saved all of it as an rtf and emailed to publishers, who set up a pdf - the first of many - to be checked. That's when the first formatting errors appeared. Another of the group was proof-reading at each stage.

It's a long story and I think I was close to giving up, and in the end accepted several compromises.



<Added>

I mean single spacing after full stops.

<Added>

The publishers required single line with no indents - indents had to be removed manually and I did this where the contributors had failed to do so. It wasn't easy to get everyone to send in their contributions in a timely way so I did in the end accept a few that needed the indents removed, or we would never have got the thing off the ground at all.

I can see, now, where the term "editor" ('ead 'itter) comes from. You end up banging your 'ead against a brick wall.

(It helps if you read the above in a Brummy accent - except that no non-Brummy can do a convincing one.)


Alex

<Added>

I've got some software that creates PDFs from Word documents, by the way. From any document that can be printed, in fact.

To save yourself a massive headache, your best option (even though it might appear to be making things harder and adding to your workload) is to remove ALL formatting and resave each document as a .txt file, bring them all back together and start on the anthology as a new block of clean, unformatted text, set up a style sheet and fly through the whole thing by hand. Then you can shuffle the stories to get the page layouts looking nice (unless you're quite happy for lots of white space - more cost!!)

And if you're making your own PDF files, get the correct printer fonts, otherwise scratch your head and wonder where all your punctuation marks have dissappeared to.

Most important of all. Find a small, local printers who will have the time to sit down with you and look over proofs and tell you how to correct the problem you won't foresee.

Colin

I've just WWMailed Anna, Richard and David to get their comments on this idea.


Alex

We are looking into the possibility of making self-publishing tools available on WW, and if we do this would include a separate store where people could browse and purchase them. No guarantees, but it's something we've been looking into.

But I don't think we'll be getting into making editorial decisions as such - apart from anything else we don't want to be seen to be taking sides - we're here to encourage the whole community, not select highlights from it. But if members wanted to group together of their own accord and self-publish a book which featured particular members, then of course that would be no problem.

That sounds like a great idea, David - looking forward for that facility to be available here.

A
xxx