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As I write this, the paperback of my book The Blank Screen: Blogging is working its way through the final stages of publication via Amazon. It's a book about blogging for writers and authors, but more importantly it has been the subject of the Summer Project. Through countless software apps and services, we've followed the creation of a genuine book. Not some test thing, not an afternoon's casual typing, but a real book that was already being written.

It's been a rocky series, but on balance I think I only looked like a complete prat once. Maybe I came close more often than that, but for the very good reason that I had already started the book before this series began, so I managed to hide some of my mistakes. I didn't hide that there were mistakes, but the aim was to get you a guide to how to really do this. Not a guide to all the deadend errors I made finding out how to do it.

The aim was also to explore the myriad software tools that are now available to us, especially as Mac users, and to see whether they really are up to the job. I've been published by companies such as the BBC and the British Film Institute, both of whom have talented staff and a long track record. In theory the software could match what they can do, and in practice ... no. Not quite.

It's when you do this for real, rather than when you do it in practice, that you really stress-test the software -- and you also come to appreciate the thinking and work that goes into traditional publishing. You see why there were quite so many people at that scary top-floor, high-powered meeting you and your agent went to that time. What those publishers already knew, and I believe we have shown during this summer project, is that you can produce bookshop-quality volumes -- but you need many different skills, and you will rely on many different people.

We would just like to have had someone to rely on or, better yet, dump on for the last stage of the lot. Creating the paperback was a job into itself and, actually, in the same moment that we typed the word "itself" there, we had a further email from Amazon. There's a wee problem with the book which, of course, needs to be sorted out.

What we did to get here

To summarize the previous eight entries in this series ... I wrote a book. Then, in the prattish article, learned -- like a prat -- that I needed to rewrite the entire thing instead of prattling on. Seriously: the book was just dire, and that was a ferociously horrible thing to realize -- and to come to that conclusion on deadline. Yet sometimes, a thing that seems impossibly far away from what you had planned does only need a slight change to put it all back on course. A slight change, a certain simplification, and maybe 30,000 words rewritten, that's all.

Having done all that, though, last week saw two milestones. The final text was now in Vellum, an e-book publishing app that we liked before and rather adore now. Then that final text was once again rewritten, at least a bit, and the e-book elements were created. Such that a fortnight before I said it would be available, you could and you now can buy the e-book of The Blank Screen: Blogging on iBooks or Amazon as you prefer.

If you've got the e-book, the paperback is easy. Hah. Paperbacks are damn hard, and I have only the advantage that I've seen the BFI go through this process, and I've read eleventy-billion paperbacks, so I know when it looks wrong. That doesn't mean I know how to get it right, but it does mean I know when it's wrong and can panic.

If you're a rabid, longtime book reader, then you get this, it is in your soul already, and if you are not then you don't -- and you will have to learn it. What pages get numbered, whether a section starts on a left page or a right, countless bordering on myriad options for margins, it is all a full-time staff job, and I had to do it in five hours.

Chiefly for this reason: I am away working on an urgent renovation, and for all my studied brilliance at bringing every tool and every Apple device I needed, I forgot to put the book's files into Dropbox. I sit halfway across the UK from my office, and I can't reach my files.

An amateur of my calibre

What I did have was the e-book in both Kindle and iBooks format. That is close to useless when it comes to softbound printing. You can't upload either of them to a printer. Vellum specifically produces solely e-books, so you can't create the paperback from there even if you have the production Vellum documents. In theory, you have to take a step back to the app that produced the words, and in my case that was Scrivener.

Only, I didn't, and don't have the Scrivener document. Then, too, if I did have it then I don't remember what changes I made to the text after I took it from Scrivener and put it into Vellum. They were necessary changes, and I had to make sure the softback has the same text, so if I were doing things the normal, sensible way, then I was going to have to go through Scrivener line by line and make the same changes again.

I had Scrivener, I had Vellum, I just didn't have documents that either could open. If you're thinking that I could open the e-book in iBooks or Kindle and just select-and-copy the text, you're where I was about 8am this morning. It doesn't work. You can select text but iBooks, for one, only actually copies out a very specific amount of it. It's something under 1,000 words, probably just about the limit of what could be called fair-use copying, and the idea of trying to do that 60 or 70 times was unappealing. It was guaranteed to be a slog, and it wasn't guaranteed to work.

However, there is an e-book tool called Calibre that is far away from the easy-to-use gorgeousness of, say, Vellum, or Apple's iBooks Author, yet does have a lot of power under the hood. I downloaded that, imported my e-book in, and told the app to spit out a plain text version. The complete book in one plain text file -- that I could load into an empty new Scrivener document.

That's what I did. Loaded it in, split it up into 31 chapters, re-applied various formatting bits -- and realized that all the internet links were gone. That was such good news: not only had the actual links gone, but the underlined text they showed was now plain. I'd have had to go through every line looking for links that I would've then changed, as you can't do a lot of clicking or tapping in a paperback book. I also realized that there was no need now to go through repeating all the last corrections I'd made, because this text was that final copy, the changes were all there.

Even so, it took me 17 goes to get Scrivener to produce the book the way I wanted.

PDF

All 17 attempts were about getting Scrivener to compile the 31 chapters together, and spit them out into a perfectly-formed PDF. It's the PDF you need to provide to a paperback printer now, whether that's via an online service such as Amazon's Createspace, or a local print shop.

I've done this before for myself and other companies via Adobe InDesign, where you're in immediate control of everything. This is the bit where we get back to the big-boy powerhouse professional publishing tools like InDesign and QuarkXpress and their advantages: one of them being that they have been doing print for decades, and do it very well.

Adobe, of course, invented the PDF format in the first place, and it is well-integrated into the current InDesign CC version, allowing you to take your print-oriented layouts and convert them into various levels of industry-standard PDF files with extra features such as registration marks (do we still need those these days?) and such.

You'd think QuarkXpress would be at a disadvantage on this point, but you'd be wrong: the company has worked tirelessly over the years to ensure that its PDF-producing capability is on par or occasionally better than that found in InDesign, mainly by carefully reproducing the options found in Adobe's full Acrobat program. While InDesign and QuarkXpress integrate PDF capability seamlessly, they both presume you already know quite a bit about traditional offset printing, such as what "marks and bleeds" are, or if you need them.

Yes, there are special PDF formats aimed at print production: embedding all fonts so that they are faithfully reproduced down to the most insignificant ligature, converting images not already set for CMYK to that standard from RGB, setting spot colors to a Pantone standard, adding paper trim or registration marks for color calibration if needed, and so on. Digital print-on-demand technology has eliminated a lot of this, but some books are still printed using offset presses or otherwise need higher-resolution PDF files than are typically produced by the default options in these programs (or OS X's built-in PDF creation ability).

QuarkXpress in its latest 2015 incarnation (which we recently reviewed) has recently added support for PDF/X-4, which is the one you want for modern digital printing versus "analog" offset.

With Scrivener, it is more hands-off. You have the most giant dialog box of settings -- at first glance it's a bit daunting, then at second glance you see you're only looking at the start of a dozen collections of settings. Very peculiarly, the settings you set stay set until you change them: so, for instance, if you go in and change something, then cancel because you need to look up something and, that cancelled setting remains in force the next time you go in.

After 17 tries, I got what I wanted -- including my own hand-crafted ToC, the table of contents -- and it looked good to me, so it was time to hand that PDF off to a printer.

Amazon Createspace

There are many companies that will take your PDF, plus a cover image, and produce a printed paperback for you. Some are local print shops, many more are online services that offer various levels of hand-holding you through the process. Only one has the advantage that whatever you produce gets straight on to the virtual shelves at Amazon.com. Unsurprisingly, that's Amazon's own Createspace company, but while that's the way I'm going, there are alternatives such as Lulu.com (never to be confused with Lululemon!) and Smashwords, and they all work in very similar ways.

The PDF is key. Get that looking right, and you're in fine shape. Consequently, I got it wrong. It looked right when I checked it in Preview, but I missed some things that only became clear after I'd got that warning email. The warning was really about the cover: somehow, the one I'd done was approximately the size of a postage stamp, and Createspace kindly zoomed it up to full size. It looked okay on the preview, but it was going to be awful in print, so that had to be fixed.

So did the fact that I had two pages reversed. In Preview on my Mac, I saw a long column of pages, and they looked fine. In Createspace's online preview and downloadable mockup PDF, the pages are side by side, and you could instantly see that I'd got two the wrong way around. Since you can rearrange PDF pages in OS X Preview, I thought that was fine: drag the two into the right positions, then re-upload the whole PDF to Amazon.

Only, Scrivener had put page numbers on. So the new PDF would go page 1, 3, 2, 4. Also, now I faced up to how opening pages shouldn't have numbers at all, they also shouldn't have headers, and I didn't know how to fix that in Scrivener. Plus the idea of an 18th attempt was dispiriting. On reflection, I think the best thing would've been to produce two PDFs from Scrivener -- one with the opening pages, and somehow no headers or footers -- and then one for the rest of the book. It's easy to combine PDFs in Preview, you just drag the second one in onto the first, so I could've done that.

Instead, I reversed those pages in Preview, and then I used PDFpen Pro, which we have also reviewed. Opened up my 17th PDF in that app, and edited it. Deleted the page numbers, deleted the headers. You feel crazily powerful doing that, though selecting a single page number like '1' took some doing. PDFpen lets you add text that looks like it was always there, too, so having finally thought of a dedication, I just wrote it in on the right page.

When I look back at all we've done, and choose my grab bag of essential tools for next time, PDFpen is going to be in there. Right in the middle of the night, looking at these wretched wrong headers and footers, thinking of PDFpen made me feel lighter. Also clever: I don't know how that is, since Smile Software makes PDFpen, I just use it -- but having realized I could benefit from it here, I did feel smart. Let me have that: I'm a recovering prat.

Cover me

Amazon lets you upload that PDF as the interior of your book, then a different PDF with the cover one. Note that it has to be the full front-and-back cover, with a spine for the title. E-books have only the front cover image, but you have to think about and create the rest for your paperback.

That spine is important: Createspace provides the numbers you need to calculate the width of your book, and you have to fit the spine to that. It also provides optional Word and InDesign templates, which it creates to be exactly right for the number of pages in your PDF. We couldn't face going back to Word or InDesign, so we pressed on.

That's why we just had a warning. There is an occasional bug with Amazon Createspace, in that when you've uploaded the interior of your book, it should automatically review it for common errors like the margins being wider than the size book you've chosen. Sometimes it just hangs part way, and after this had happened a few times, we unticked the automatic review option, and sent the book on its way. We were rather trusting that Amazon's human beings would spot the problem and let us know. They did, and they did.

When we're done talking here, I'm off to check out the warning, and any online proofing I can do: yep, I'm going to read the whole book again tonight. Good thing I like it, isn't it? Once I've done that, and fixed whatever the problems are, I will swiftly click on OK and will send the book off to Amazon, where I have just one more job to do. I have to buy a copy. Amazon will sell it at cost or nearly, certainly far below the sales price you set toward the end of the process.

Buy a proof copy of the book, and get it sent to you. When it arrives, re-re-re-read the book looking for errors. Then when those are fixed, you get to say yes. Make this book live to the world: you've got promotions to do.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)