Roll up, roll up and stroke my ego even more! Oh and Quark Xpress and Indesign aren’t the only players in town

Roll up, roll up and stroke me ego even more! Oh and Quark Xpress and Indesign aren’t the only players in towns

Busy little bee that I am, yesterday I published my second volume of poems/verse on Amazon. It is a collection of all the more recent pieces I have written. You can find it here. If you think you might be interested, you can find the first volume here.

Go on, spend a dime or two. Short arms, deep pockets? Never an attractive trait in man, woman or beast. Treat yourself. Push the boat out. Summon up that Santa spirit. Go for it. Live dangerously.

Oh, what the hell.

. . .

A few weeks ago, I wrote about commercial publishing, vanity publishing and doing it yourself. I think I also wrote that ‘vanity publishing’ is a tad unkind as a description of doin it yourself. You simply might not want to try your luck at having some commercial publisher taking you up. You might just want — as I do and my friend and former colleagues Tully Potter did — a few nicely printed and bound copies of your book to give to family and friends. It is a collection of verse for children and is called The Lockdown Poems.

So using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing is a godsend: it costs you nothing. You only pay if and when you order discounted ‘author’s copies’. The two books of poems I am plugging cost just £1.70/$2.26/€2 each, just the cost of printing. Try buying a cappuccino or a latte for that sum. And if someone else buys a copy, they pay. Here is a link to the KDP website if you want to chance your arm.

However, as I said a few weeks ago, not everyone might want to format/prepare their manuscript for printing, or feel capable of doing so. For the books I had printed (i.e. published) myself and for Tully I used Indesign. A friend, Ben Le Vay who has about a dozen commercially published books to his name (his publisher is Brandt and, for example there is this on British railways and this about British eccentricities, also uses KDP for some projects. He also used Indesign at work but told me the other day I saw him for lunch that he used Microsoft Word for his latest book, about the invasion of Pearl Harbor. This was self-published).

KDP is really not difficult to use and is open to everyone (and as I pointed out, a great many of the online shysters who will publish your book also use — at no cost to themselves — KDP, but don’t tell you and you will pay through the nose).

I also recently offered to do the formatting work for anyone who would like to have copies of ‘their book’ printed by KDP. But I shall not charge the earth, just charge by the hour for whatever work I am asked to do.

With a view to possibly getting such work, I have started a new KDP identity call St Breward Press (which is what I used for Tully’s book) and if you would like me to do that work formatting your manuscript for you, please get in touch with me via the form above on the right  and I shall send you more details and you can tell me what you want.

. . .

The once reigning piece of software, Quark Xpress, is also still available, but Indesign has taken top spot for the simple reason that it is not half as expensive as Quark (though sadly if you want to use either, you now have to take out a ‘subscription’ which is the new model for flogging software and in my view something of a rip-off).

Quark shot themselves in the foot: for many years it was the only sophisticated software versatile, capable enough and with sufficient features to use to publish newspapers and magazines. It was used around the world, but because it was the only software then available, it charged through the bloody nose, and then some.

The Daily Mail, where I (and Tully and Ben) used to work as a sub-editors) ditched Quark several years ago. This was for several reasons: cost was one and because it was using Apple Macs and wanted to switch to Windows and needed software which would integrate with its other Windows software. I then began using Indesign.

Eventually, Adobe (of Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator etc) which then sold Pagemaker (and which in the mid-1990s Quark was hammering and sales were dropping), turned down an offer to sell up to Quark and decided to come up with its own desktop publishing software and started developing Indesign. Since then it has never looked back. Moral: don’t get greedy.

NB Another excellent piece of desktop publishing software is Affinity Publisher. It works very much the same as do Quark Xpress and Indesign (and it can open Indesign files which have been saved in a certain format).

But it has one, for me distinct, drawback: the working area is cramped and the tool palettes encroach to much. In Indesign it isn’t and they don’t.

But it is a true bargain if you are on a budget and want excellent software. An annual Adobe subscription will cost you £239.64. And — annual — you pay that some again a year later. But it is still cheaper than Quark which charges £358/$474/€423.

Affinity Publisher costs just £47.99/$63.56/€56.56, and it is yours for life. (I bought it several years ago when you could still buy it outright. You might find a legacy copy on eBay, but don’t hold your breath as there don’t seem to be many of them around.)

Don’t be put off by such a low price — it is not a cheap and nasty piece of kit. Most of what you can do in Indesign — and 9/10 users will be need just a few of its features, so make that all of what you can do in Indesign — can by done by Publisher. But, as I say, its workspace is cramped.

Take a look a these screenshots. The respective working areas are marked out in red:

Adobe Indesign

Affinity Publisher

The Publisher workspace might not look that much smaller, but believe me it is just a tad too small. And the tools’ palette really need not be that big. Making it smaller would allow the workspace to be bigger. 

Ironically, Affinity began as a small firm called Serif producing inexpensive software for Windows machines. That software wasn’t bad, but with Publisher, Photo and Designer — the counterparts of Adobe’s Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator — there has been a qualitative leap forward and they can stand tall beside the Adobe versions.

Professionals might disagree, but in my experience for what many of us want to do — and frankly what we can do — the Affinity software certainly does the work. The main point about subscriptions is that I should imagine many companies can afford to take one out for Adobe (and Quark’s) products because the cost is tax-deductible.