Part 4

The Final Part (In one sense.)

Okay – you have your graphics files all ready to go. Perhaps you don’t have/can’t afford a publishing program but still want to create a doujinshi. Can you?

Of course you can.

It will take a little longer, because someone still has to do that layout and distillation and if it ain’t you, that means the printer will have to. And *that* means that you’ll have to explain to them what you want, and how you want it, etc, etc.

So, let’s for the moment, assume that you have a CD burned of your publication, in PDF form. You bring it to the printers and you explain that you want X number of copies, and that you want X lb. paper, and Y type of cover. Then you hand it to them and give them a date you need it by. Request a job estimate with those parameters and get it in writing!

The more copies you print, the less expensive your run is per copy. So, if I print 200 copies of my book, each copy may cost $6, for a total of $1200, but if I print 500 copies, each copy may cost $3.50 for a total of $1750. I can sell the second printing for less and still make back the money and then some. These are just made-up numbers – the actual cost will depend on the weight of the paper, the cover stock, how many pages, any extra work the printers put in, etc.

Finding a printer than will do a small run isn’t easy, but don’t get discouraged, they are out there. Using a local printer is a very good idea, because you can run back and forth easily to pick up proofs, deliver corrected pages and to communicate with them face to face. This last is crucial when you are trying to explain the way the book should look.

Remember, your printer doesn’t usually print this kind of thing, so you may need to talk things over with him/her. If you’re doing a Japanese-style doujinshi, you’ll need to convince the printer that the pages are in the right order – please don’t flip them – and that the cover art is labeled correctly, because it will be read “backwards.”

You may, at this point, be tempted to give the printer plenty of time to work on your book – do NOT do this. Printers work on rush jobs all day long for many clients. If you give them too much time, your job will disappear to the bottom of the pile and be forgotten.

So, when you are budgeting your time, give the PDF to the printer at least two weeks before you need it. Minimum. Then tell them you need it in four days. I’m not kidding. This way, when they don’t make the deadline, and it’s a day and half late, you still have a day clearance on the original deadline. You WILL need this extra time, so don’t think you’re being unrealistic.

A proof is the copy of the manuscript that is printed by the printer for you to look over. Also called, I believe, a “blue” in book publishing. Take the proof home and read it very carefully. Do not read the story – look at the words, the pictures, etc. for problems.

If you have an Ed in your life, hand a copy of the proof over to him, again, and let him edit it, again. Anyone else you can rely on for this is good, too. Remember, you cannot ever have too many people to proof or copy edit your book!

If you were the one who made the PDF, at this point, unless a virtual miracle occurred, you’ll need to make some corrections to your document. Remember – you can’t change a PDF. You’ll need to reopen the publishing program and make the changes there, then redistill it – or make the changes on the graphics files and send those to the printer. (In newer versions of Acrobat, you edit directly in the PDF.) Either way, once the changes get to the printer, make SURE you get another proof copy, to make sure that the changes have been made. You may have to do this several times, as you find new and exciting problems. Each time the printer will take a little while to run off the new proof. More days pass.

If there are problems from the printer’s side – a line through the page, the quality of the reproduction isn’t good – don’t be nice. Be firm. Point out the problem, expect it to be fixed. Don’t expect the printer to find the problems for you – they won’t. They don’t care. And if page 50 has a black line running through the middle of it and you don’t catch it – the printer won’t fix it for you, even if s/he does catch it, because it’s not her/his job. (I exclude Sally from Trukmanns from this – she *did* catch and fix several things on our last job. But she was unusual in this.)

At last, you will pass a proof…time will be running out, though and you must continue to express urgency, because I swear to every god I believe in that printers do NOT manage time as do other humans. The printer will eventually send out the job to the binder. Make sure you get a good look at the cover before you send it to the bindery, because that too will have issues and you will need to fix things and make sure the printer is printing the fornt and back cover correctly – not to mention the spine, which may have art of its own. When everything is sent to the binder, you’ve basically gone too far to turn around, so everything has to be as right as possible.

When your books are done, do not expect the printer to call, even if they say they will. Again, give the printer a few days too little, so when they blow the first printing (and they will – there will be issues with the cover flaking, or cracking, or not working) there is still time to get the book before you actually need it.

When you pick up the book, before you go anywhere, check it thoroughly from cover to cover, to make sure that they printed it exactly the way you wanted it. If there are any mistakes you had corrected already, but for some reason were not changed, get the manager and demand a discount on the final product – or a reprint with the changes. Be polite, but firm. There is no reason to accept a finished product that it is not correct.

And then, at last, after weeks of hard work, you will be holding in your hand a finished, bound doujinshi. Congratulations!

And there you have it – a step-by-step intro to publishing a doujinshi. I hope that this has been helpful. When you get yours all done, email me and let me know how it turned out!

Part 3 Terms introduced in earlier entries are in italics, new terms, in bold. So, you have your materials, and you have your hard and software in place. Now you’re ready to go. Let’s assume you’re working with hard copy first. You’ll need to scan your hard copy in. I recommend 400 DPI – although I was reminded by alert reader Chalcahuite yesterday that technically it’s PPI, or Pixels Per Inch, when referring to electronic images. Nonetheless, my scanner has that particular field labeled DPI, and no one I know ever says PPI…but that may be because few of my friends work in digital illustration. ^_^ So, you scan in a picture at 400 DPI, in Black and White. My scanner has three settings for things in B&W (Black and White). B&W Document, makes for *very* sharp contrasts between the black and white areas, and crisp lines…but where there are patterns or screentones or grays, they lose their impact, by being treated as black *or* white. The B&W Photo setting makes everything look a little fuzzy for me and its nigh on impossible to sharpen black lines. So I stick with B&W Image, which means I have to clean up the background whites and blacks a little, because the scan picks up dirt, shadows from other pages, etc. If you have a decent graphics program, cleaning up white areas is a snap. Black areas are a little trickier, because if you use clean up only the black, you don’t really affect the near-black areas…if you use the “select similar” function (or whatever your program has to select similar colors), you run the risk of losing shading and tones. A little trial and error ought to give you a good idea of what will work best for you. Just make sure you SAVE the original and any versions you want to keep. Frequently. Then back them up – in two places, one in a removed location. I’m not kidding. I keep a CD of the current version I’m working with, and I back up on a remote server, as well as have the images in my hard drive. This way if the computer exploded, the work I’ve done isn’t lost – not even if my house burned down. Of course, if *that* happened, I’d be screwed anyway, because no one I know has a computer powerful enough to work on the doujinshi…but that’s a different matter entirely. ^_^ If you’re using a digital file, then cleanup isn’t probably necessary…but you might want to print out each page anyway, to make sure it’s legible and clear. Either way, once your file is ready to go, I suggest saving it as a .tif – TIFs can be read by Macs or PCs, and pretty much every publishing software program can use them. This is more important than it seems, unless you have a semi-professional set-up in your home. When ALC Publishing was working on Rica ‘tte Kanji!?, I was shuttling back and forth between three different computers – one was a Mac and two were PCs. With few problems, I was able to read all the files on all of the computers – and even switch back and forth between Quark versions. However, I would not recommend this as a rule. ;-) I do not recommend typing whole stories in your graphics programs either…no matter how high the resolution, text still looks a little grainy as a graphic file, IMHO. It’s perfectly fine to do your word balloon lettering and background words..but if you are doing an illustrated story, for instance, I would not recommend setting up the page in Photoshop…use your publishing software for that and import the graphics files into that. Which brings me to your publishing software. You’ll need to make a template for your publication. This will involve all the things we’ve talked about so far – the size of the publication, the graphics files, text, etc… Setting up pages was very hard for me, since, as I mentioned a while back, I’m graphically retarded. I have a hard time with spatial perception. So, let me try and explain this simply and hopefully you’ll understand. It’d be alot easier if you all had a Frank Barzaga around to ask, but here’s what I’ve learned so far. You’re making a book. That means you’ll have pages that are on the left side of the binding crease, and pages on the right. Depending on how you plan the book to be read, you’ll be starting with a right or left page. Do this right now – go pick up a book. Any book. Open the cover. The VERY first page you see (assuming you are reading a western-style book) is on the right hand of the page. That is your Page “A”. The gutter, i.e., the white space to the left of the text, disappears into the binding. If you want to see the *very* inside edge of the page, you’d need to break the binding to do it. Flip the page. Now you are looking at Page “B”. B is bound on the right and the gutter is on the right. Kapeesh? You’ll need to set up a template for Page A (right-hand pages) and Page B (left-hand pages.) The rule of thumb in Western-style books is that As are odd-numbered pages and Bs are even numbered pages. Okay – I am NOT going to try and teach you any specific publishing program. I just can’t. It’s too damn complex and they all have their own tutorials. Visit the Quark or Adobe websites and download the tutorials and a demo version and go to it. But do yourself a favor and cultivate a person who has some experience and who can answer frantic, panicky questions at 2AM. That will help alot. For instance, I have a friend Ed, who works at night and spent 12 years as a printer, so he’s my panic button. Get yourself an Ed…they are very useful. ^_^ But I can tell you this – set your template up to reflect the size of your publication, and to allow Page As to have a left-hand gutter (about 1/4 inch of absolutely dead white space that can be lost in the gutter) and page Bs to have the same on the right. If you, or the artist you are working with, doesn’t mind some of the image to be lost in the binding crease, then go for it! Background images and tones don’t need to be seen fully to be understood. If there is significant dialogue or images that are going to be lost in the gutter, you might want to adjust your image within the template, to give it a little gutter space. (Templates aren’t absolutely FIXED. You can alter any given page any way you want…but templates make it a buttload easier on the whole to set up gutters and bleeds. Bleeds are images that come *right* to the edge of the page – in fact, they really go over the edge slightly and are cut off. So you or your artist might want to have pages that have a nice white gutter, but go right the edge of the page or, go from edge to edge or, have white borders around the whole or part of the page. The template will make it easy to drop and image in and adjust it. As an editor-in-chief, I recommend that you vary the page construction, so it’s not all boxes, or all full bleeds – it’s easier for a person to read a story when it varies a little. Also bleeds don’t have to be a whole page – it could be one part of the image and the rest of the outside page edge is white. They do this *alot* in Japanese manga. For instance – maybe you have a spreading tree as background. The branches could bleed off the page in a top panel, but leave uncluttered white space below it for the lower panels. Check out any shoujo manga and you’ll see what I mean. Some pages are screentone from end to end, some are bordered with white, or black (used mostly for flashback) and some are a mixture of all of the above. Once you’ve set up your A and B templates, you can simply plop As and Bs alternatively down into your file – however many pages you’re going to want. Important to remember – you MUST have a total page number that is divisible by 4. 16 if you’re going for offset printing. Unless you’re doing a copy book or something printed off at home, you’ll need to remember that a printer prints things off in sets of four (sixteen for offset printers). To understand this, open up a magazine or newsletter and look at page 1. Page 2 is printed inside Page 1, but Page 3 is a separate piece of paper. If you follow Page 1-2 through the binding you’ll see that on the other side of that pice of paper are printed Pages 71 and 72, or whatever page number they are. Another way to do this is to take any piece of paper and fold it in half, then set it down in front of you like a card. Number the page you see 1, then open it up. Page 2 is on the left, Page 3 on the right and the back cover is page 4. It’s four “pages” but one piece of paper. Printers print this way – one piece of paper at a time, but four pages. Don’t feel pressured to use every page – blank white space is fine on the fist and last pages. So, you set your Page As and Page Bs down – let’s say 36 of them. A/B/A/B. etc., until there are 36 pages total. If you are setting this up to be read western-style, then you can have your software set up automatic page numbering, by setting up a text box and using whatever method that software uses for automatic numbering. You’ll add your graphic file to the page and then, you may want to use the commands to center it, make it fill the page, shift the borders, whatever. That’s all up to you and like I said, I don’t have it in me to teach you how to use a publishing program. Save this often. And back it up. When you think it looks right, print it out and look at EVERY page carefully. Then get about five other people to do that, too. You can never, *ever* have enough proofreaders and editors. Even if you have five editors, there will still be mistakes. Make corrections, import the new files, and re-save and re-backup. When everything looks right, you’ll need to export it as a PDF. Each publishing program does this a little differently, so again, a friend like Ed is a useful thing, when you can’t get Adobe Distiller to work with Quark at midnight. He’s always awake and has the patience of a saint. :-) A PDF is a picture of your document. It is not editable, unless you have the version of Distiller that allows you to unlock a PDF file. So, when you hand your printer a CD with a PDF file, s/he/they will not be able to fix the typo on page three. You’ll need to do that yourself and re-distill the PDF. Most printers can accept large file transfers or emails, which is good, because the average size of a publications is very large indeed. Lastly, some of you may be wondering how exactly one goes about doing all this, when one is publishing something to be read Japanese-style, that is right to left? Well, nothing changes, really. You’ll be placing your pages in backwards, so if it’s a 36-page book, the Page 36 goes into the first document page, and 35 into the second, etc. all the way down to Page 1 as the last page. Unless you have the international version of software, you probably won’t be able to use an automatic page numbering command, but typing in page numbers by hand isn’t hard, especially when compared with everything else you’ve done so far, or everything that’s going to come. ^_^ Which brings us to adventures with the printer. I’ll leave that for the next entry, because I get agita just thinking about it.

Part One

AniLesboCon (ALC) Publishing was born in 2003 with the mission of creating and disseminating high-quality yuri manga (that is, Japanese-style comics with lesbian images and stories) in English.

Last year we published two books: Yuri Monogatari 1, a compilation of nine yuri stories by thirteen artists and writers from seven different countries and; Rica ‘tte Kanji!?, a translation from the Japanese version of the sweet and funny stories of Rica and her girlfriend Miho, by Rica Takashima.

This year, ALC is proud to announce the publication of WORKS by Eriko Tadeno, which now on sale at the Yuricon Shop.

Even as I type, we are also working on this year’s volume of Yuri Monogatari, which is slated for a summer release – and for the fall, Volume 1 of Shoujoai ni Bouken: The Adventures of Yuriko, with illustrations.

So, after three books under my belt, and two more in the making, and as several folks have asked me for advice about this, I thought I’d walk you through the process of publishing your own doujinshi.

Doujinshi is Japanese for a work put together by a like-minded group of people…i.e., a fan work. In other words, a doujinshi is a self-published, or small-press published work. There are many, many groups of people doing this in the American comics field, and several good small comics presses extant. You may want to get in touch with them for their advice, if you want to do American-style comics. I’ll be focusing on Japanese-style doujinshi, with a strong emphasis on the kinds of things you might see at Comiket (Comic Market) in Tokyo.

Let me start by saying this: This is work. Like anything else, if you want your publication to look good, you’ll need either a lot of time, energy and money to put into this, or a stable of friends and employees to help. Both is best.  ^_^

First you need to decide what *kind* of doujinshi you are going to be making. Today’s entry will be some thoughts about the things you need to think about before you begin.

On the cheap/easy end of the scale is something called a copy book. This is basically xeroxed pages folded together and stapled, with *maybe* a color copy cover. You can format the pages easily in any graphics program, import them as images into Word, or some other common word processing program – or even copy them directly and cut and tape the pages together in the order you want, then run the pages through a copy machine at work or school. The color copy page is folded and stapled on and you’re good to go.

If you choose a copy book then your costs are going to primarily be: time, for formatting and; materials, for copying. You might have paper costs and ink, if you’re doing this at home, and a saddle stapler will be helpful. If you want to spend a little more money and want it to look nice, you can go to a copy center and have them do it – saves time, costs more. If you’re like me, you can steal both time and materials from work and only have to be careful about doing it out of sight of your supervisor. ;-)

Any type other than a copy book is going to require binding of *some* kind. If you plan on stapling, or having your book spiral bound, then you can go to a copy center. If you plan on making something with a flat spine (called perfect binding) you’ll need to talk to a real print shop. If your book is more than 50 pages, perfect binding looks *much* nicer and more professional – it also costs a lot more.

Unless you want a hard cover book, you’re going to want to look at card stock of varying weights or perhaps textured paper, also of various weights. Weight indicates how thick and heavy (duh) the paper is. I wouldn’t swear to it, but my guess is that a paper’s weight is based on how heavy a standard amount of that paper is… i.e., 20 lb. weight paper (which is standard copy machine paper) would weigh 20 lbs. for a ream, or 1000 pages, or whatever the standard amount of pages is, while 24 lb. paper weighs more for the same number of pages.

Paper will give the book a soft, flexible body, card stock will give it strength and solidity. And of course, your budget will dictate what you can use. If you’re trying to do this on the cheap, a lightweight textured paper, or pale-colored paper can probably go through any home printer and come out looking good…. You can get paper from any paper seller, on- or off-line, for cheaper than buying it at an office supply place, or buying it through a printer. Stationery, art, scrapbook, craft stores have small amounts of different papers you can experiment with to see what works for you.

Okay, next – book size. This is a REALLY important choice, because it will make a difference as to how easy it will be to print and bind. And you’ll need to know it for your page layout, too (that will come later, but you NEED to know before you start what size you’re going to use.)

The standard size in the U.S. for paper is 8.5″ x 11″. We and Canada are just about the only countries in the world that uses this as a standard size. ^_^

If you are making a copy book, then you can just assume you’re folding a standard sheet of paper in half, so each page is 5.5″ x 8.5″. Or, conversely, you’ll be printing on 11″ x 17″ pages and folding *them* in half, so you’ll have a book that is 8.5″ x 11″.

If you truly desire to publish a doujinshi-style book, then your book will probably be one of several sizes, both of which are international standards, but almost never used in the U.S. The usual paperback-sized doujinshi are A5, although you can find doujinshi in all ISO sizes under the sun.

A5 is technically 148mm x 210mm, but in U.S. measurements it’s slightly harder to render: 5.83 x 8.27 inches. Stick with metric, if you can, when setting up your parameters.

If you choose one of the other international sizes, remember this – chances are, your printer (hardware and/or person) will not have ISO size paper to hand, so if your chosen size is bigger than the normal 8.5″ x 11″ sheet, you’ll be paying for very big paper, which will have to be cut down. A5 can be cut down from a standard sheet and is a nice size to read from, IMHO…that’s what ALC Publishing uses. B5 is also common for doujinshi (182 mm, 257 mm/ 7″ x 9-7/8″) and so is A4 (210 x 297 / 8-1/4″ x 11-3/4″), but A4 is larger than our standard page – remember, bigger paper means more expensive.

One last consideration before you start…the paper you will print on should be heavy – i.e., thick – enough to not have art show through when you print it out. Unless you’ve got light strokes and no heavy black areas, regular copy paper won’t be thick enough.

Okay…that’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll depress you with the list of equipment you’ll need. ^_^