New Books being Scanned and edited

[David Niall Wilson]

Just to put some of this in perspective....because sometimes I feel as if people get the wrong impression of the amount of work behind digital books ... I thought I'd mention what's in progress now.

Currently we have three or four more of Chet Williamson's novels that have been scanned from hardcover and paperback, a trilogy by Billie-Sue Mosiman, plus her thriller WIDOW, several more books from Sidney Williams, The Holy Terror by Wayne Allen Sallee - Several by Beth Massie, and a few new authors I haven't mentioned. We are reconstructing very literally ALL of Jeff Osier's short fiction...and there is a lot more to it than just scanning.

First I strip all formatting from the scanned pages and send them in groups of files to David Dodd, my associate editor. He has a system for taking the scans (odd and even pages in separate files) and reconstructing the book. Once this is done, he first scans for common errors, like hyphens at the ends of lines that are no longer at the ends of lines, and garbled letters. Then we do a quick spell-check. THEN we copy-edit. Once he's done with that he sends it back to me. I do the basic formatting and give it another go-through for errors.

Since we have several vendors, all requiring different file types and other details, I end up with several copies of the final .doc file. I use a program to convert this to e-BOOK format, and then I re-open the HTML output from this in Dreamweaver to fix formatting glitches. Once this is done, we use CALIBRE to convert the output to the various formats we require (except ADOBE which I do by hand). This is good for all but Overdrive.com - our library distributor. For them I have to create a PRC file (mobipocket) with DRM (Digital Rights Management) applied to work with the library systems. I also have to run the e-PUB files through a check program, re-open them in yet another program, and edit out several common errors so that it will get through their system.

Once this is done, the files are put live at Crossroad Press - and from there I begin distributing them to the Horror Mall, Amazon, Smashwords, Overdrive, The Horror and Fantasy Drive-Thru sites (and some others we're working with now).

And that's just the e-books. Soon I'll give some insight on the audiobook process. I bet ol' Gotham Knight will chime in here too..

Just letting you know a lot of work went into something you often get for as little as .99 or $2.99...we are earning it!

DNW

[Gothic Knight]

Dave gave a very accurate description of everything that goes into making an eBook from the scanning of the original printed book to the final formatting and distribution to the various sites for sale to the public. The only step he omitted, but alluded to, is he takes the original printed book (MMPB, TPB, or hardcover), has the book cut neatly just past the binding/glue, then scans the pages and has the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software interpret what was on the printed pages. He then sends me the various files and I put the scanned and OCR'd pages back together in order -- the reconstruction process.

Sometimes the OCR engine does an excellent job, especially if the original paper is thick and the pages are clean, meaning no smudges, smeared print, water stains, hand written notes, etc. The cleaner files are obviously easier to copy-edit because of fewer OCR'd errors. If the original pages aren't in the best of shape, the OCR engine has more difficulty, which increases the time and effort involved to copy-edit the document. I search for common OCR mistakes such as ." being interpreted as !' or ?', a capital I being interpreted as a 1, messed up ellipses (...) and the like. I have a growing list of common mistakes that I look for in each document. If the scan is fairly clean I'll sometimes do the spellchecking when I do the copy-editing, but I'll do another spellcheck at the end as well. I scan for hyphens from words originally hyphenated in the book, such as today being to- (at the end of one line) and day (beginning of next line), and correct those by removing the hyphen. Sometimes I do that first and sometimes when I'm copy-editing the book, but I always do a scan at the end to see if I've missed any.

The other part of editing is correcting the mistakes that were wrong in the original text. These are normally misspellings or transposed letters. Sometimes the original text might have left off accent marks, like the one over cliché, and I update those as well. Some publishers did a good job with the original edits. Others, not so good.

The last part of my copy-editing is I take my cleaned up document and compare it to the original text. I ensure that all new lines are indented as they were originally, make sure all quotes are present, apply any special formatting like italics, bold, and underlining. If it's a block of poetry, I will apply a special style to it to try to offset it from the regular text. The final thing is to look for the scene breaks in the original book -- sometimes they have a separator like * * *, other times they have an extra blank line to offset the two paragraphs. To make it consistent, Dave and I use a common separator throughout the books.

After all that is done, I send the book back to Dave where he does the final formatting and conversion to the different formats (ePub, PDF, MOBI and PRC). The other step is getting the new cover in place. After the final document formats are ready, they're listed on the Crossroad Press website, then distributed elsewhere.

There's definitely a lot of work that goes into the conversion from start to finish. It's a very rewarding feeling when the book is complete and an author gets to see their work available again, sometimes for the first time in 20+ years. There's quite a bit available by Crossroad Press right now and as Dave mentioned, there's plenty more on the way. If you have any questions about the process or any of the Crossroad titles, let us know and we'll be glad to help.

[willysid]

Interesting to read the details.

[David Niall Wilson]

I kind of hoped it would be...just didn't want people to think you took a word doc and said "Save as e-book" ...