So bad it&#x27;s good.

it is a truth universally acknowledged that no one single book printer across the globe uses the same cover template sizing despite the books being the same fucking size.

And you will spend hours tweaking everything in GIMP because FUCK Adobe, only for them to turn around and tell you it's still not right.

klrcastellan

I think it's the language barrier but I don't understand what you mean by "cover template sizing"

Also books are not the same size, at least in France there is no standard sizes for books, there's no standard paperbook or hardcover sizes. The sizing and dimensions of a book depends on the publisher, the collection, and what the printer is able to make

Also yeah fuck Adobe... I hâte that it is the standard in the publishing sector, and I especially hate that there no real good open source alternative to a software like InDesign. As an editor I tested some and every alternative to it was just shitty, very hard to work with, limited and not optimal for working with a whole book

So there are some industry standards, especially if you are catering to indie/self publishers who are trying to hit the global market because we have a select few distributors who will work with indies.

It’s actually kind of a thing: you can spot indie self publishers because they do have a specific size they’ve been pushed into by the industry because those are the places that give us access to the global market.

(It used to be you could also tell who was self pub based on paper quality, because self-pub authors tend to opt for nicer paper quality to look more professional, while trad-pub goes for thinner, less white paper.)

Indie trade paperback are usually uniform sizes, as are hardback. The only major variable is usually the spine width due to page count, paper weight, etc

Which is taken into account by the printer when they generate a template for you to fit your cover design into. This step is usually automated by a computer.

So they generate the template based on whether you’re doing paperback, hardback and what your page count, paper weight, etc is. You make your cover wrap fit the template. You follow their guidelines exactly.

And then, very nearly every time the thing that scans your upload will tell you it’s wrong. Where is it wrong? Couldn’t tell you, chief. It’s just wrong.

Okay, so you try again, once again using the template they generated for you. If you’re me you’ll have emailed customer service by this point to ensure the automated template is correct. It is. The computer didn’t make an error. You did. Where’s the error? Guess :)

If you’re lucky it’ll work the second time. What did you do differently? No idea. You just fiddle-fucked with it slightly and now it works despite following the exact same outline as before.

And then you have to do this across multiple platforms for mass distribution because everyone has different printers that require different things. Sometimes 3-4 times depending on which markets you’re trying to reach.

And then some of the front cover will still wrap around onto the spine or be printed crooked. So then when you do reprints you alter your cover design to stop that happening.

And then they’ll change their printing specs again and not update the template generator. Rinse, repeat, lose your mind about it on Tumblr for a bit. Try again.

ered

I was a bit confused about this, but this is about print services that also distribute the book, right?

Because I’ve worked with various printing houses over the past few decades for very different projects, and you can pretty much get whatever you want done if you shop around a bit. Want a specific size? No problem, etc. But of course, everything that happens once the book is printed will all be on you.

I'm doing a spring cleaning in my online shop, and almost everything has a discounted price! ✨🌸🧹

🌸 annikcomics.bigcartel.com 🌸

The shipping is available to limited countries! Please read the INFO page before ordering, thank you! 💜

Some of the Witch Door merch you can find in my shop:

✨shiny✨anime✨prints!✨

Fanart of Witch Hat Atelier, Delicious in Dungeon, Mononoke and Dandadan, on a shiny pearl paper ✨👌

You can find them in my shop: https://annikcomics.bigcartel.com/products

(Shipping available to limited countries, please read the info page first!)

#witch hat atelier #dandadan

Ooohhh I there are this cool Dandadan holo stickers as well, btw!! Check 'em!

Opening my author email these days really is just some variation of "hello influencer, we have noticed your [product] and that you are very good at it. We would like to talk to you about a way you can expand your audience using our unique subscription service training people how to self publish there book," and that's great and all, but I'm doing that shit for free.

star-dragon-in-the-tardis

Anyway, in light of Draft2Digital implementing fees for new authors or authors who do not make the yearly threshold of sales (I get why they're doing it, and it's still less expensive than Ingram by a country mile. But it still sucks for the people affected by it and it will drive more people to Amazon :/), you can publish your digital media directly through Kobo.

They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.

But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.

I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.

Anyway. Hope that helps someone.

I am having a moment of "Wait what do you mean there are people charging fees if an author doesn't hit a threshold of sales?" I am looking at Ingram right now and wondering if I need to pull my book or not. :-/

#rip my sales income #already pennies soon will be none #anyway good to know #ps buy my book

Ingram isn't currently charging you to host if you don't meet a certain royalty threshold.

D2D has implemented it to try and combat the fact that their free access model means they've been getting hammered by AI slop uploads. (Barnes and Noble are also getting hammered, and they've chosen instead to restrict author accounts to 100 books per account.) They're hoping having a small fee will discourage those people.

The $12 yearly maintenance fee through D2D is still substantially lower than what Ingram charges to distribute through them every time you make an upload (the last time I looked it worked out at $75 per physical book + $25 every time you wanted to make a change to the files) but it's still enough of a barrier that some authors who don't make the $100+ a year threshold are looking for a different platform.

It's disheartening. I understand by D2D are doing what they are doing, but yeah. Not great.

ered

It seems I’m going to have to start reading my emails so I don’t learn these things on tumblr…

That being said, I do understand the reasoning behind the fees (thanks slop peddlers), but as someone who sells maybe two books a year, I’ll be making negative dollars lmao

playerprophet

So I knew I wanted to self-indulgently print copies of my fanfic, "The Town Theatre Presents: Orpheus and Eurydice," pretty much as soon as I finished it. I managed to put it off until this winter, when I wanted to have them ready to go in January. One thing happened after another and I have ended up stitching and binding these babies all by myself but with this pretty letterpress covers by local artist arquoise press who helped me out a lot and. Well. Just look at these!

Anyway, if you would like a copy I could use the help making back the money I spent on all these print costs and these beautiful covers. The first few orders come with a limited bonus bookmark, also made by arqoise press (thank you!). Also this is a living story and couldn't just go to print as it was. The print copy is a slightly different beast.

Thank you also to Harpy, who I know is on tumblr but I forget your username I'm sorry, for helping with the layout and all the bookbinding advice.

I am selling the book at cost, with no profit margin. If the shipping seems a little steep, it's because I've been burned by not charging enough before. I will refund any overcharges that I might make once it's in the mail. Thanks for your patience. I'm currently working on binding as many as I can at a time and the first batch should ship in May.

Preorder a copy here!

Can I interest you in some Queer Comics?

💜 https://annikcomics.itch.io/ 💜

As a moderately technical person with an extremely good understanding of computers AND an extremely good understanding of the things that nontechnical people find frustrating about computers, it is always just a little exhausting to finish making a specific recommendation to a nontechnical person only to have people who are extremely technical and extremely bad at understanding the things that nontechnical people find frustrating about computers come in and make a recommendation that will require more effort and expense on the part of the nontechnical person or are literally exactly the opposite of what the nontechnical person is asking for because the technical respondent didn't understand what the nontechnical person was saying.

"My sister has had an expensive gaming machine and didn't use it and doesn't use it now but might do some light gaming stuff at an indeterminate point in the future and is currently using my personal laptop to do basic web browsing, I'm trying to ensure that my sister can keep doing web browsing but whenever I ask my friends for advice they start at a high price point and the people I know who have purchased used equipment have bad experiences with it that I'm not interested in duplicating; is it possible to get an inexpensive computer that will accomplish what I'm looking for here without it turning into a time suck because I'm not particularly good at computers?" is not what someone says when they want you to start speccing out a machine that requires a graphics card that costs as much as the machine that they actually need. The question was not "can you find me a less expensive gaming machine?" it was "is there such a thing as an affordable non-garbage machine my sister can use to look at Ao3 or are my choices 'used office machine old enough to have a driver's license,' 'cheap-but-trash machine that will have to be replaced annually,' or 'gaming rig that costs as much as a car'?"

It's like when people ask me for advice on improving their online security and privacy because their data was revealed in a breach and I talk about using bitwarden and protonmail and basic degoogling and then other people pop into the comments to recommend installing linux, buying a burner phone, and self-hosting an encrypted server.

I get where you're coming from here, almost everybody CAN become technical if they want to, but most people who are not CURRENTLY technical can't generally become technical in the timeframe that they would need to in order to manage whatever problem they're having.

If someone is saying "My friends insist the only bread I can eat is fresh-made croissants from a boutique patisserie, and my dad only eats stale wonderbread, is there something other than that out there that I can have for lunch?" the answer isn't "you should start making sourdough, everyone can learn to bake."

One of the things that happened with my start-to-failure linux stream the other day is I was looking up the steps for how to verify the checksum for an ISO file in Windows (because I always forget how to) so that I could trust the file that I downloaded was safe to install. The file that was the download of Ubuntu Studio. Which is, to be clear, linux.

So I search for information about how to do checksum bullshit in Windows and the instructions I come to from the Ubuntu site say "If you aren't using linux on windows, why on earth not? You should do this by installing linux."

THAT IS THE THING THAT I AM TRYING TO DO I NEED AN INSTRUCTION FOR HOW TO DO A STEP IN THE OS THAT I AM CURRENTLY USING SO THAT I CAN INSTALL LINUX.

Seriously, follow some links with me. From the link above to this:

From that to releases:

From the release download you can get info on how to burn the images to disk:

Which tells you that you need to verify the image:

and then links you for info on how to do that in Linux!!!!!

THIS CHASES NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE AWAY. THIS IS WHY NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE THINK LINUX IS SCARY. BECAUSE WE GO 'OH NO YOU HAVE TO VERIFY YOUR DOWNLOAD IT'S A VITAL SECURITY STEP' and then the non-technical people go "Okay how do I do that" and the instructions say "Why aren't you already using linux, dipshit?"

THIS IS POOR TECH COMMUNICATION. NERDS, I LOVE YOU BUT THIS IS WHY PEOPLE USE FUCKING WINDOWS WINDOWS SUCKS BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE FUN OF THEM FOR USING WINDOWS.

benevolentpsychosis

Ubuntu is not recommended by anybody worth their salt in tech and hasn't been for years, and their shitty documentation should not be representative of all who are technically inclined. Regardless, the solution is in your screenshot, method one: a single command.

wsl --install Ubuntu-24.04

Hey friend, can you point to where in the screenshots it tells you to run that command?

Because that is, legitimately, where a lot of people get lost.

*I* knew how to find other documentation without relying on ONLY links from the foundation I got the install from, non-technical people *don't* know how to do that and a lack of clear instructions paired with a tremendously unwelcoming user base makes beginners stumble.

Ubuntu is not the only tech documentation I'm familiar with (and is certainly not the only linux documentation that is confusing, circular, and poorly formatted), and there are a ton of tech literate people who recommend various ubuntu distros for a number of reasons.

My job is talking to non-technical people about their tech stacks so that the decision-makers don't have to be exposed to techs and the whole reason that my job is necessary is because "git gud" is an unfortunately common communication strategy in tech spaces.

My hobby is infosec and this attitude of "you're stupid for using this program and stupider for missing the obvious instruction to open a terminal window and install via command line" is genuinely a massive security problem because it convinces normies that any attempt to "do tech stuff" is futile so they don't bother.

There's plenty of tech stuff out there that isn't hard and could be approachable *if only the people documenting it and advocating for its use were less deeply repellant.*

alexseanchai

I can point to where in the screenshot, but I'm not going to, because anything involving opening a terminal At All is probably too techy for anyone who has only ever used graphical interfaces, which I'm pretty sure is the vast majority of people who have only ever used Windows

wanderingthunderstorm

Uh. Ok.

We are trying to verify the integrity of an ISO file

We do that by verifying the checksum for the ISO file

OP's Screenshots, in order, show:

The frustrating and condescending message the she received when she tried to look up further instructions for this step in the Ubuntu documentation pages. This links you to:

What seems to be the beginning of the Ubuntu install guide??? From which you can choose your specific use case, i.e. WSL, which then links you to:

The place where it tells you to run the command in question - which seems to be a page where it is telling you to install Ubuntu, NOT a page telling you how to verify the checksums on individual software packets you might have downloaded in order to do so? Which... if you're non-tech-y, and you're worried about possibly bricking your one and only computer because you ran an unverified program that might be a virus or broken somehow (damaged/missing packets - not that you, a non-tech-savvy person, would know that) you are probably ready to give up by this point? Also, if you have the individual install files and not the singular Ubuntu file referenced in that command line, that command would fail anyway, would it not???

A screenshot that indicates a list of places to download the ISO files in question [cut off, but presumably listed below] and links you to a how-to for burning the images to a disk

A screenshot that tells you that you need to verify the ISO integrity, and then apparently (per OP) links you to how to do that in Ubuntu... the thing that you don't have installed...

Like. Okay. Is there a world in which downloading that specific file packet (Ubuntu 24.04) and running that specific command (wsl --install Ubuntu-24.04) bypasses the need for all of this, because it simply installs Ubuntu, this verifying checksums as part of the process? I mean, sure, maybe. But at no point in any of those screenshots does it say anything like "running 'wsl --install -Unbuntu 24.04' will verify checksums as part of the process"; so to me, it in fact does NOT say that in the screenshots. At best that's something that you read into the instructions with outside knowledge that you have, that the non-tech set that this stream was directed at do not have. That's absolutely going to scare them off!

And also, what else does that do? Does it, for instance, uninstall or otherwise render unusable the Windows OS that OP seems to be trying to leave intact, for non-techy users who are just trying to get their feet wet with Linux? Because if so, that's a perfect deliberation of why non-tech people hate tech people, and also why OP has the job that she does.

Also, there's two methods for installing Ubuntu shown in that screenshot. It's late, and I'm sick again, and very tired, but in my experience, often - not always, but often - when there's two methods to do something, there's a possibility that one of the methods accomplishes something different than the other method; you can't simply mix and match unless you understand both pretty in depth. If you are a non-tech person trying to follow these directions, you are barely following the tech jargon in these screenshots. The last thing you want to do is guess and be wrong and fuck up your entire computer. You are not going to knowingly follow instructions from Method A when you are supposed to be following Method B unless you are an idiot, because then when you take your computer to Geek nephew or Geek Squad, they're going to look at you and be like "well why didn't you just follow the instructions?" And I know this, because I've had to rewrite tech instructions on the fly for people in my real life at my real job because the engineers just assumed that Everybody Knew Stuff that Everybody Did Not Know.

All of which is to say. No. It doesn't say that. Those words may be literally printed on the screenshot in one of those screenshots, but it literally does not say to run that specific command line to verify a checksum anywhere that I can see anywhere in those screenshots, and this is why people hate tech people.

fluxxdog

I do consider myself a tech person and let me tell you something: You are 100% percent CORRECT.

The problem with a lot of this is a lack of communication. Like, you want Linux to be used by the everyday person? Don't tell them RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual)! You need to WTFM (WRITE THE FUCKING MANUAL) so people can actually read it.

This is the reason global warming got the bullshit rep that it did: The people explaining it did not know how to actually communicate it. It took DECADES to even get what little traction we have and it's still "Golly! Look at all this snow! Sure don't look like GlObAl WaRmInG to me!"

Techies can get so lost in the sauce they forget that not everyone has their level of expertise. XKCD 2501.

#one of my techier coworkers once complained to me about writing instructions too detailed #but i know most of my coworkers will need all of the steps listed #and that means all of them

This is making me realize that I phrased that poorly:

I can see where the screenshot says to run wsl --install, but what it does not say, which I can tell you the nontechnical person is going to have as the first question when they see that is:

"WHERE do I run wsl --install...?"

They aren't going to intuit that you need to open command prompt and run as admin then type 'wsl --install...'. (The .exe file is much more likely to be how a non-technical person would try to install it except that nontechnical people have been warned a million times not to click on .exe files if they don't know exactly what they do)

And no, installing that won't complete the checksum, it will give you an environment on your windows computer where you can run the checksum in linux, so once you've followed those instructions you need to go back to the instructions for how to run the checksum in linux instead of figuring out how to do it in Windows - which is possible, simple, and what you searched for.

ered

On a bit of a tangent, but like in any field, tech experts tend to vastly overestimate the level of knowledge a layman has.

For example, I do in house tech support at my workplace. While a few of my coworkers might be able to follow along the conversation above, a good % of them can not reliably locate the downloads folder on their computer.

I’m not saying this to shit on my coworkers. They’re all smart people and highly competent in their own field. But very few of them can confidently to install a printer, let alone an operating system. They might use computers, but they don’t really know how anything works.

And before you think I work with older people, no, youngest of my coworkers are in their early twenties, and most are 30-50. Age doesn’t factor in at all. What does is personal interest. And a lot of people just aren’t interested, or see tech as something intimidating and lack confidence in figuring it out. Overly complicated tech jargon doesn’t help with either.

#one of the only two edible candies in Fazerin parhaat #kiss kiss is the sound you make when calling a cat (kissa in finnish) over

THE WITCH DOOR FRIDAY UPDATE!

Chapter 16 page 20 New reader? Start here!

Become a Patron and read ahead!

erlie

Since I no longer work on this project, I feel like I can finally share what I have been working on for past 6-5 years.

I was a game and character artist on RuPaul's Drag Race Superstar and I was in charge of the queen character (aside from RuPaul and Trixie is also little complicated) and I was also doing the clothes and makeup for the game.

Here are some of my favourites!

Just remember I am no longer artist on this project and I am looking for new opportunities!

xochihuacoyotl

so. not to doxx myself (i've talked about this here before though) but i live in Kansas. and my license was just revoked very suddenly and immediately because i'm trans and had changed my gender marker.

so now i cannot legally drive or vote until/unless i let them force me to carry around a card that misgenders me and outs me as trans, because i certainly don't look female anymore.

xochihuacoyotl

so hey if you have the means and want to help with any of this, please consider donating to the ACLU of Kansas because they are at least going to try to do something to push back against this, and i'm such a panicky wreck that the only thing i can do to get through my immediate gut reaction to having my license revoked tonight (i cannot stress enough that i received the letter today saying that my license is no longer valid tomorrow) is focus on the fact that there's at least one entity trying to protect me and my fellow trans kansans.

holespoles

Finnish cat stamps

#shock reveal #digital art

THE WITCH DOOR WEDNESDAY UPDATE!

Chapter 16 page 15 New reader? Start here!

sinsinewave

elikkäs Meta (Facebook) näköjään sulki tuon Digitaalinen Itsenäisyys-aloitteen Threads-tilin, varmaan tajusivat että sehän uhkaa heidän bisneksiään

tästä kannattaa siis entistä enemmän pitää meteliä, Zuckerberg voi haistaa paskat

ja vielä muistutuksena että itse aloite löytyy täältä

sinsinewave

and for my non-Finnish audience: Meta aka Facebook shut down the Threads account of a Finnish citizens' initiative, Digitaalinen Itsenäisyys (Digital Independence), which demands that Finland's critical infrastructure be hosted on EU/ETA-based platforms and exclusively under EU/ETA legislation the obvious conclusion is that they noticed the threat to their and their buddies' business in that and are trying to suppress it so if you know Finnish people, or are one, make some noise about this; and if you're a citizen go sign the initiative, it's the second link in the first post

new!!!!! art!!!!!!!

1 week left to order my physical comic zines from my online shop (for now)!✨ I draw a little doodle in each of them 😊

Shipping is available to limites countries, please read the info page carefully! 🙏💜

👉 annikcomics.bigcartel.com 👈