Technology
June 2nd, 2010
Technology
The publishing process involves lots and lots of technology. Here’s the technology I use to create and publish the Broomstick books.
| Web hosting and e-mail | Digital Space, which has been taken over by Jumpline. Customer service is excellent—you’re talking to someone in Ohio, not Bangalore. |
| Blog Software | For the Mt. Sneffels Press site, I use WordPress, which is free, although frankly not well-documented. |
| Domain names | SimpleURL.com (very inexpensive and excellent service) |
| Text editing | Textpad. The original American Flying Broomstick website was hand-coded. Even now that everything is in WordPress (see below), Textpad comes in very handy. |
| Picture editing | ULead PhotoImpact 4.2, which is pretty old (See www.ulead.com for a much more current version. ULead is now part of Corel.) Also Adobe Photoshop Elements. I have version 6. Another interesting tool is FastStone Image Viewer, which is much more than a viewer—you can do some pretty sophisticated things—check it out—it’s free! |
| FTP | Ipswitch WS_FTP Pro |
| First place to look for information on any subject | Wikipedia |
| Geographic Visualization | DeLorme Topo USA 7.0 (For Broom 1 I used version 4.0) and Google Earth (probably the most amazing thing on the Internet today!) |
| The best motivation in the world to write book-length fiction (yes, this is how the Broom series started) | The National Novel Writing Month is held every November. |
| Text creation and editing | For Broom 1 and Broom 2, Microsoft Word 97 (yes, that’s really old, too!). For Broom 3, the completely free and fully-featured Open Office Suite Writer. I’ve now moved everything to Open Office. |
| Cover creation and editing | Open Office Suite, particularly the Draw tool. I used to use PowerPoint 97, but find the Open Office version very friendly and full-featured, plus it has native PDF creation capability. |
| Conversion to PDF | For Broom 1 and Broom 2, Foxit PDF Creator, but note the glitch at the bottom of page 106 of Broom 2. For Broom 3, the Open Office Suite Writer and Draw have native capability to create PDFs |
| Mailing Lists | AWeber |
| ISBN, barcodes | ISBN.org. ISBNs are amazingly expensive. And getting the barcode .tiff is also amazingly expensive. I use Bowker Bar Codes. |
| Printing | Market Source Book Production Services. The folks at Market Source are friendly, helpful, and return phone calls. They specialize in short-run printing—they have sophisticated digital presses that take your PDF files (one for the cover, the other for the interior) and create bound books. Those who have seen a hardcopy of any of the Broom series, plus several other books we publish at Mt. Sneffels Press, are mightily impressed with the quality. They’re fast, too. From proof to your finished copies at your doorstep can be less than a month, sometimes a great deal less. But note: they are printers, not publishers—they print exactly what you send them! |
| Order Taking (Shopping Cart) | PayPal Merchant Services. Very easy to set up, although set aside several hours for intense concentration to get it right the first time. |
| Shipping | U.S. Postal Service |
| Shipping materials, e.g., envelopes | Paper Mart |
| Site usage tracking | Google Analytics. These folks protect your privacy—I have no access to specific individuals, just summary reports. |
| Advertising | Right now I’m not doing any online advertising, but look at ThisIsTrue, Inc., also Google Adwords |
| Banner | The banner is for shows and signings and also forms the backdrop for the two exerpt videos on the Broom 1 and Broom 2 pages. Banners in Vinyl provides excellent service at a remarkably low price. |
| Test Environment for hand-coded web pages | You may have noticed all the site’s web pages end with .php instead of .htm. That allows me to do “server side includes” which makes site maintenance much, much easier. But testing the new pages requires a set of software on my local computer to test php pages. It’s called “wampserver” and is free. It includes an Apache webserver, a php interpreter, and a SQLite database server. Pretty cool! |
| Comment Form Provider (discontinued) | Now that I have the Mt. Sneffelspress blog, I don’t need an external comment form provider. But if you do, check out www.freedback.com, a Canadian firm, which provides the comment forms at a very reasonable price and filters out all the spam that would otherwise come your way. |
