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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

e-publishing « Previous | |Next »
May 2, 2010

This is an interesting interview on self-publishing and e-books with Rudy Rucker. This takes us beyond the territory of this earlier post that is still dominated by the traditional forms of publishing.

Rucker is a science fiction author who has taken the digital plunge for his books and talks about it on his blog. He runs an online or webzine science fiction magazine called Flurb.

He shows what can be done with self-publishing. He charts a path for those like me who are taking the first hesitant steps in this direction with DIY publishing my photography.

10April21_Tasmania, Melbourne, SA _358.jpg Gary Sauer-Thompson, Strahan, Tasmania, 2010

Rucker's book of paintings --Better Worlds---is the model for me.

As he points out:

Although I’m a well-known writer, I have zero reputation as a painter, and I was daunted by the prospect of trying to approach serious art world publishers. Also I liked the idea of very rapidly getting the book all designed and, in some sense, into print. Those who’ve put together photo books as gifts know how this feels.

By the way, I didn’t actually use the Lulu photo book templates to design my art book because these templates insist on cropping your pictures to certain fixed aspect ratios. And my paintings are in all kinds of different width-to-height ratios. Perhaps some other sites have more flexible photo book formats, I don’t know.

What I did instead was simply to design the paintings book in Microsoft Word, and to save this file as a PDF file, taking some pains to ensure that the images got saved at a (non-default) high resolution of 400 pixels per inch. And then I uploaded the PDF to Lulu, and that’s the book, designed exactly the way I want.

He adds that a nice thing about this set-up is that every now and then he can redesign the book and add all his most recent paintings.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:59 PM |