Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad
No skin off my back!  I'll be the first to admit that there are big differences in POD and traditional publishing and that neither one is the perfect solution for everyone. Generally, the former assumes you want (and can handle) full control of every little thing from typefaces and margins to marketing and publicity, whereas the latter assumes you don't want that control (or responsibility) and are instead interested in paying someone else to handle them. |
Of course, the hard part is when you have a semi-professional existence in both the writing
and graphic/book design fields, and you have to convince the Big Publishing Company that you're
not just a silly little author who needs to run along and clarify tenses while the Professional Graphic Artists do their thing.
But there's ways around that.
My favorite is to essentially dictate the design of the book in the text. Not, like, in a "This book is set in Helvetica, which symbolizes..." sort of way (because they'd just as easily make you change that to Garamond) but if there's something specific you want on the cover, you can basically write the book in a way that the Professional Cover Designer can't possibly choose anything
else. 
I think of it as...making their work easy for them.
This is far easier for fiction, of course. For textbooks, you're kind of on your own.