Print Need Advice - My DH passed, I want to print his writings

I'm hoping I can get some advice. My dear husband recently passed and I would like to take his writings and create a few books to give to our family. Most of the writings are from when he was young and typed or hand written on paper (before kids came along) and some after we retired in MS Word.

Are there any publishers who will create a small run of books that aren't going written for marketing?

I have a scanner and was going to create PDFs of the material but I feel I need to know what format a publisher wound want. His writings include; a novel, plays, short stories, historical pieces and poetry. I'm thinking I could have the novel as 1 book and then his other writings in 1 or 2 books. The stack of his writings is about 2,000 pages--single sided.

Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Robin

 

Self publishing through a print on demand service like Barnes & Noble or KDP might be a convenient solution if you were happy to make the work available to a wider audience. POD subtracts the cost through royalties, so it does mean you would have to charge up front for the copy, but it also saves you stumping up for a print run. Some smaller publishers might be willing to help out with that but I know more about sending magazines to the plates than paperback books.

 

Someone who can answer your question will be along directly, but I wanted to say I think it's a great thing you're doing. I hope someone will do the same for me when I'm gone.

 

I wouldn't mind making it available to others. I'll look into Barnesand Noble and KDP. Thank you for your suggestions.
Robin

 

Good luck and best wishes, and like Earp said it's a wonderful thing that you are doing!

 

Thank you, he was such a wonderful husband and father and dearly missed. I hope the books will be a way for us to keep him close and hear his voice. He loved to write and was so creative. I want to make sure his history is there for the family.
I image someone will do the same for you but I hope it's a long way off.
Thank you, Robin

 

You could look into Fiverr for freelancers who might format the material for you, because it looks like you need more help than simply getting the name of a printing provider, who would not help you with how to do all this. It sounds like you need someone who knows to either do it for you or guide you. Perhaps google terms of book formatting services, book printing etc. If there are any printing companies near you, you may consider visiting in person and enquiring. Another term you may want to look up is typesetting - you could look for a typesetter. I believe typesetting is the processing of data for the printing of books, so you may find what you're looking for if you googled typesetting services.

For ease of reading, depending on time constraints, skill level or amount of money you can spend on this, you may consider having someone type up your husband's writings. Imagine having the original scan and a typed up version of the same page, side by side, on a double spread.

Aside from digital copies, you may want to consider looking into book binding - as in, binding the physical papers into an actual book, so you have an original.

I'm so sorry for your loss. Sending hugs. These will be precious memories for you and the whole family.

 

Thank you. I was looking at the Barnes and Nobel self publishing site and as you suggested there are issues with the material. I did a test scan, created a PDF and look over B&N PDF requirements. They need embedded fonts. Tried embedding but the font is not supported by Windows so I can embedded.

I am leaning toward your suggestion of typing his material. There is a lot but I think I can also recruit my sister-in-law to help. Something to do during pandemic at home. Not only will it solve the embedding issues but the final product will look so much better. I'll look into binding the originals. I love the idea of having some of his original hand written pieces as an image to add to the books. Great idea, thanks!

 

I don't know what country your based , but it probably doesn't make too much difference . I think you should be looking for a printer . Modern computer based printing makes it easy for printers to print small batches of books , magazines etc. Publishing on a small scale is full of third party exploiters and you could end up paying too much .

 

I am new to this site and I realize that this thread is a couple of months old, but I have some direct experience that may provide some insight. I had a good friend (since deceased) whose older brother passed away in 1994. The brother had remarried late in life, to a Venezuelan psychologist. He was so in love with her that he began exploring the extant psychological literature on love. With his wife as researcher and co-author, he wrote a book entitled "Loveology," for the purpose of pulling all the research together into a single source.

He had completed the manuscript before he died, and it was in the hands of a literary agent who was a friend of my friend. The agent had no luck finding a publisher who was interested in taking on a book that was so dry and scientific -- and also which needed a serious edit to make it ready for publication. With the principle author dead and the widow living in Venezuela and not being fluent in English, the agent pronounced the task impossible. So my friend turned to me. She and the widow decided that they wanted to self-publish the book as a memorial to the late brother/husband. I was editing the quarterly newsletter for a non-profit that my friend and I both served as members of the board, so she decided that I could do it.

I took on the task, and it was a LOT of work. The manuscript existed only as a single, typewritten copy. OCR (optical character recognition) was in its infancy in the mid 1990s, and I didn't have access to it anyway. So for starters I retyped the entire manuscript, using WordPerfect (today I would use Word). Then I went through the book as a proof reader/copy editor. If the author had been alive and "in the loop" I would have suggested a number of changes, mostly because he wrote almost entirely in the passive voice. In this case, we made a conscious decision to leave it as he had written it and to correct only for spelling and grammar.

With the text transcribed and edited, I then had to fire up a computer drafting program to re-create a number of diagrams. Since I'm an architect by original profession, that part was easy.

E-books and print-on-demand did not exist in the mid-1990s, so the only option was a small run "vanity press" printer. I obtained prices from three or four, went over them with my friend (who, in turn, discussed them with the widow), and we settled on a printer. At the time, I was dating a woman who was a graphic artist so we brainstormed a cover concept and she created the cover art. I set up the master pages in the desktop publishing program I was using then (Publish-It!, which unfortunately no longer exists), imported the text, inserted the diagrams, and printed a master copy on a laser printer.

The master copy I printed was sent to the printer as camera-ready copy. They printed it and shipped two cases of books to my friend. At the time, the minimum print run was 500 copies, and my admittedly fuzzy recollection is that it cost around $3,000 for the printing. That was in 1995. I didn't charge anything for my services; if I had charged going rates, it would have been several thousand dollars worth of editorial work.

As it happens, I have a copy of that book sitting right next to my desk. Even 25 years later I am quite pleased with the end result. It looks like a real book.

Some things would be done differently today, of course. OCR might (or might not) be more efficient that retyping to get the manuscript into Word. Today, rather than print out camera-ready copy for the printer you would "print" the finished document to a .PDF file and send that to a printer. While a good desktop publishing program would still be an asset, there is a learning curve, and it's quite possible to do an acceptable job directly in Microsoft Word.