IP Digital is our imprint dedicated to publishing you to the world.
You may already have a print version of your work that is “out of print”. Or you may be thinking about composing something for the Net. Or on CD. You may have a work you want to test out there in the market before spending thousands of dollars getting it into print. Then you owe it to yourself to get in touch with us.
The IPD Difference
In the rush to publish on the Net, many people forget about quality. With the explosion of material in cyberspace, it’s even more important now to ensure your work is the best it can be before it gets out there.
That’s where IPD is different from most online publishers, who are only too happy to take on your work for a modest fee and a tempting royalty arrangement. They may even digitise your work for free and give you space on their website along with other hopeful authors. Quality control is often never discussed. Turn-around and cash-flow are what drives these entrepreneurs. You wait and wait. And wait. Months later, you may wonder why you bothered — your manuscript probably had more exposure in your desk drawer!
IPD offers a better approach. We assess your work and suggest ways to improve it before you put it out there. This takes time and patience on your part. But creating memorable work was never meant to be easy. Or quick. Once the work is ready to be published, we produce an effective design and layout. Because first impressions still matter, even moreso on the Net. A professionally designed cover still attracts attention on the screen as well as on paper; thoughtful choice of typography and integration of design elements will keep your viewers viewing, rather than distracting them from your content. It's well worth the investment.
Once the work is published you need to promote it. Through IP Sales (IPS) we will work with you to design a strategy for attracting attention and producing sales. Again, this depends on the quality of your work — it’s hard to sell a frog as a prince except in fairy tales. But if you accept our suggestions along the way, you won’t need a magic wand.
From Ms to Publication
For a typical project, there’ll be stages involving assessment, editorial, production and promotion. First, you query us, with a proposal and a one-page synopsis of your work. We may then invite you to send us a sample (~10%) of your work. We view your sample for free, but if we request the full work, we charge a fee of $195 to have it reviewed by an expert. This will provide you with a report on the readiness of the project for publication, and an estimate of any costs involved getting it through the other phases.
And Beyond...
We find that going digital is beneficial for several reasons. Let’s say you live in Perth, and you want to perform at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The organisers are hesitant because they don’t know enough about your work, and the deadline for extending invitations to readers was yesterday. Simply point them to your IPhosted mini-site and they have immediate access to your work, your bio, your photo. Was there any doubt of your being invited?
IP is serious about promotion. IPS has an ever-growing list of contacts we use to sell authors’ work to distributors, libraries, booksellers, media outlets, academics and individuals. New titles are promoted via email circulars we send to these lists, as well as in IP eNews, our quarterly electronic newsletter, which has a global circulation and links to many key sites on the Internet.
From Print to pdf
For most text-based work, we first produce a 'desktopped' digital version, very much like the one we send to a printer when we’re producing a book. That digital version is then published as a pdf file (Portable Document Format). These are also digital files but they have two key features that the desktopped files don’t. First they occupy less space because the data is compressed, to sometimes as little as 10% of the original file. This is important for a number of reasons. Smaller files can be sent over the Internet more quickly, and take less storage space on servers and hard drives. Where the project is published on portable media such as CDs, there's more space on which to fit the work. In fact, with current CDs, it possible to fit hundreds of works — The Collected Works of William Shakespeare and more!
PDFs are also cross-platform, making it possible for your work to be read on a range of computer platforms, such as Windows, Macintosh and Unix systems. , as well as iPods and other new devices. One of the frustrations of early digital publishing was that you could never guarantee that your precious work would look the same from one machine to the next. Macintosh computers were the most reliable since they share a common operating system, etc. But in the world of Windows computers, a fish on one machine might be mistaken for a frog on another. Worse than that, works produced on Macintoshes were often unreadable by Windows machines. The more graphics and non-text elements included by the work the less you could rely on seeing what you’d intended on another machine.
Things haven’t got any better at the operating system level. Macs can read PC files, but not with 100% reliability. PC manufacturers can’t seem to agree on a common operating system. And if you’re a scientist dealing with sensitive research nothing less than 100% will do. Complicating an already stressful situation is the fact that operating systems are regularly updated, increasing the chances of incompatibility.
Enter Adobe Systems with Acrobat©. PDFs work by translating everything in a work— text as well as graphics — into bit-mapped images. The software doesn’t care what you feed in; you get bit-mapped data out the other end. The elegance of this approach is that all computers are capable of reading and redrawing bit-maps. The only tricky part is ensuring that the fonts used in your original will be converted to the same — or very similar fonts — on the receiving machine. To make a long story short, Acrobat gets around this by allowing for the “embedding” of certain fonts, which ensures that the receiving computer doesn’t have to apply substitution if it doesn’t have the original font.
Will people really buy digital work?
Once we publish your work in Acrobat, there are different
ways for it to get to people who want to read it. Your work can be downloaded
from our website, or sent to a purchaser as an email attachment. Or it can
be “burnt” to CD or DVD and posted to the customer. IP also partners with CD Baby, a digital distributor in the USA that uploads our titles for sale by the track or album to the iTunes Store and other online shops.
Multimedia projects
are more complicated, but the final stages are still the same—produce a
master that will be readable across platforms and then publish it in a package
that
most
people already have on their computer. In the case of The
Gallery, our first interactive, multimedia work, this was Acrobat,
but there are other packages that allow you to produce a single master
that
will work for everyone, for example Macromedia’s Director, or Adobe’s
GoLive.
Each requires a dedicated viewer. For Acrobat, it’s Acrobat Reader; for Director and GoLive, it could be Shockwave or Flash Player. The good news is that all these readers are freely available from their respective companies, if they aren’t already onboard your computer when you bought it. A piece of good advice, though — check back on the websites of these companies for updates of their software and ensure you have the latest version. Or subscribe to lists like VersionTracker, which give you weekly updates on what software has been updated.
Once your e-book has been mastered, the next thing is to decide how to package it. For most IPD titles, we recommend producing both a CD and an online version. Online versions can be sold and distributed over the Internet for much less than a physical book, but libraries and many individual buyers still like something physical rather than a slice of cyberspace.
Courtney Frederiksen
Assistant Editor, IP