Pulp Fiction. For Real.

Common sizes.

'Hondo,' by Louis L'Amour,
is a pocketbook.






by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved



Time for another scatter-brained post. What I have been doing is researching POD at Lulu.com.

I've made a pdf in a 5x7" format, for example. This has big wide margins all around and the information from Lulu says they 'scale it down' to 75%. They offer a free downloadable template, for both the cover and the manuscript.

This is fine, but the template wouldn't open on my desktop and it took all day and a lot of reading before I stumbled across another post where the author mentions his own template is for OpenOffice.org.

A little light went off in my head, as Lulu also points the way to OpenOffice software in their help pages...so it looks, maybe, by a process of pure and irrational deduction, that I need to download the 76-meg file from them. (2.0.0 minimum noted by Lulu.)

And maybe, just maybe I will get the answers I need. It's a matter of comfort zone, important enough to any control freak.

But in the paperback by Thomas Harris, 'Hannibal,' the left margin 'gutter?' is about 3/8 of an inch and the outer margin about 1/4", maybe a little more.

So what I need to do is format a new pdf, from a .doc file, built up in the 4.25 x 6.875 inch size, with appropriate margins at left, right, top and bottom.

I will take pains to include the proper number of blank pages, and in some small idiosyncratic way, minimal but tasteful end matter.

My great dream in life is to produce the finest in pulp fiction that I possibly can.

At Lulu, in order to publish a book for sale, the author must purchase a 'proof copy.' My initial calculation shows a 427-page book in this class will run about $13.04, although at this point I have no idea of whether that is my cost or what? Or what? You sort of have to sort of er; fudge your way around inside any of these websites to learn what's going on. I could 'publish' what I have in a heartbeat.

Let's assume that I am either distitute of any cash whatsoever, or a cheap prick.

Either way, wouldn't it be nice to simply nail it the first time around? Rather than fixing this, and that, and the other thing, and end up with twenty bogus, unsellable copies of the book laying around?

One of my big questions in this size of book is the margin and font size. My first impression in a .doc was that it looked like a children's book, due to the big size and few words on the page!

But I will work that out as I go along.

Anyway, that's one of my goals for 2011. I want to publish, 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' as a POD somewhere, using my micropublishing business model.

Notes. I printed out a re-sized B & W of the cover, which startled me until I remembered that I now have this little wide-screen monitor, which stretches tthings wider. Comparing it to an actual paperback in the same size shows that the text is a little too close to the edge of the book.

The jargon is important, otherwise you don't really know what you are talking about. That seems clear enough.