WHY IT TAKES A FULL DAY TO RELEASE A BOOK

 Steve Cole writes:

 

When we completed the Romulan Master Starship Book, I noted this on MY DAY and people immediately started asking why it wasn't on the PDF stores for sale. Here is the answer.
    

When the design team types the last character of the book (which is what I reported), fixes the last correction, and inserts the last art, getting it on sale still takes a bit of work. Call it "post-production" or "distribution" if you like.
    

First, we have to actually make the PDF. It's a big book, and "print to PDF" takes a few minutes. Then, we print a copy and check it. Rarely, there are font problems or other issues, but these are easily spotted and fixed (requiring another round of PDF and print). There are no end of "settings" in the PDF software, and all of these have to be exactly right, and that never happens the first try, even running a comprehensive checklist. So we look at the first printing, figure out what settings are wrong, fix them, and do the book over, killing an hour. (Remember that various steps are done by various people, each of whom has more to do than this. The "settings" step has to be done by Leanna, and if she's busy getting mail orders shipped out, things may be delayed an hour or two.)
    

Mostly, there are format flow issues. What the PDF software creates is not always what we typed or (more importantly) where we typed it. Sometimes a paragraph is a line shorter or longer, which means that all of our efforts to make things break and flow properly are wasted. Paragraphs, charts, and art often "break" in ugly spaces, putting part of it on one page and part on another. If a piece of art three inches high ends up 2.9 inches from the bottom of the page, it kicks to the next column and leaves a big white spot so we have to go back and make the art a little smaller. Sometimes one word of a paragraph ends up on the next page and we do various things to pull it back onto the proper page. Sometimes a sub-heading or the heading of a chart or table is on one page and the chart or table is on the next. We have to force the heading to go to the next page. There are ways to make that automatic, but sometimes the automatic layout is uglier than the manual one. When you set it for automatic (i.e., no matter what, you stupid computer, keep these lines together!) sometimes you get a layout that leaves some big empty spots. We have been known to manually break a chart, put in a second header bar, and re-flow the entire book. The charts need to be accessible and look good.
    

The problem is that every "bad break" we fix cascades all the way to the end of the book. Pulling a line back or pushing a heading forward changes the flow of every page from that point on. So every time we change one thing, we have to go back and re-PDF and re-print the entire book and go to the point of the fix and start checking all over again. When things are really intense we just print a few pages at a time so that we don't waste so much paper. The Romulan Master Starship Book was 178 pages long, so imagine that we print a copy, find and fix a problem on page 22, then have to reprint the book before we can check page 23. That looks good, but moving on we find a problem on page 32 and have to do the book over again from that point. In a book of this size, it's not unusual to "go do everything over" 10 or 12 times, each time taking up to an hour.
    

Sooner or later, we have pounded all the way through the book and have a clean PDF. Somewhere along the line, Simone created the color cover, walked it around the building to get everyone's approval, and provided it in PDF format. (She also does small jpgs for the shopping cart.) This allows us to do the minor step of inserting the cover (a separate PDF) into the stack. If we don't miss any obscure settings, this just takes a few minutes.
    

Then we have to upload the book to Warehouse 23, Wargame Vault, and DriveThru RPG. Assuming nothing goes wrong, this can easily take an hour or two, not just for upload time, but to click all of the right boxes their software requires (which is not automatic). In the case of the Romulan Master Starship Book, the upload to one store failed three times for unknown reasons, meaning it took hours to do what everyone assumes takes only a few seconds.
    

Once the book is uploaded, each store has to release it. This depends on how busy they are and how many people are on duty. This should take minutes but can take a day, and on a holiday weekend or if someone is out sick or if a lot of companies are uploading a lot of books that day, it can take until the next business day.
    

Jean wrote the press release (from the product description) earlier and walked it around the building to get everyone's approval. Once the press release is approved, Jean checks to see if the book was released. (She can only do the press release once, and we have to have an actual link to every store, which means the press release waits for every store to release it.) In theory on a holiday weekend it might be on one store for a day or two before all of the stores have released it and we can do the press release. Once all of that happens, Jean goes to a a list she has of websites and posts the press release about the new product. Every one of these sites has its own (different) rules about what can be said, by whom, how often, and in what sections of their site. It can easily take Jean an entire day to jump through all of these hoops, cross all of these "T's" and dot all of these "I's" to make sure everyone knows that the book is out. This includes the email that one store sends to everyone who bought a similar product.
    

And of course, once that happens, we start getting feedback. People notice things that they don't understand, or minor typos, questions, clarifications, and whatever. Nobody ever released a perfect book, but in the miracle age of PDFs, we can fix anything and everything and re-upload it. In some cases, we have re-uploaded a new book every week for a month, in others (such as this one) we'll just do one final-fix re-upload when we're ready to start selling hard copy books. Just remember that the re-upload also goes through every one of the above steps.