Renewed books may be just what you’re looking for if–

• You want to reprint a book but it’s been so long since the first run that nobody has the original files any more.
• You’ve come across an heirloom in your family museum and would like to publish it to share with all the relatives.
• The book you’ve got in mind is out of print, and the copyright is no longer in effect.

We haven’t been able to help people with such needs except by painstaking methodology that needed hours and hours of fine-tuning.

The printer I use says his company has leading-edge scanning equipment. I send him a copy of the book, which is scanned and made up into a book, printed and shipped. Changes can be made to the text, and a new cover can be supplied. The results are fantastic. I cannot tell the difference between the original and final book without a high-powered magnifying glass.

Total cost is a lot less than starting from scratch. Try it next time you need an exact reprint of a book. Of course, you can substitute new pages for minimal cost if you want to update or correct the first version.

Of course you must own all publishing rights for the book or you could run into legal problems. Another point to remember is that just because the copyright has expired doesn’t give you open access to the book. Check to be sure the owner of the original copyright didn’t renew all rights. Don’t get trapped by the embarrassment and financial penalties for breaking copyright law.

We offer book replicating services at Griffith Publishing, editors of this blog.

Finally, full-color books in quantities from 50 to 2,000 are available from Griffith Publishing and other book designers. We’ve always been able to provide full-color books for our authors, but it involved sending artwork and proofs back and forth across thousands of miles of ocean. Beautiful books, and for coffee table presentation books, still the best route to go. But not everybody has $12,000 or more to produce a small book.

Now we can actually print 100 to 500 full-color books 6×9 inches with 48 to 60 pages for under $4 each right here in the USA. There’s more involved than the printing, of course, and for that you’d better hire an expert–someone who will work one-on-one with you to give you a thorough edit job, not just a spell check, and a design on the cover and throughout the book that will zero in on what your book offers and set it apart from all others in its class.

This is a big step for people who have loved the hard-cover photo books offered by ShutterFly. We can’t match the look of those books, but since they cost about $29 per book or more, we think there are quite a few people who would rather give up some of the glamor and style of a ShutterFly book for 100 or so well-produced full-color books.

If you’re curious about how this works and are watching the holidays creep closer every hour and wondering what’s in store, call us at 1 800 359-9503. Or send us email at hodi@mindspring.com.

Joyce Griffith

Andrew Trindle, MD (example)

Call us at 1 800 359-9503 for your FREE information packet

Or visit our websites: Physician Publishing, and Doctor Author

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I am revealing my secret plan for attracting physician authors to my business.

I am going to buy an email list of about 25,000 physicians for $499. I was glad to find this list service because I can use the addresses as often and in as many ways as I want to, except to re-sell the list. My plan then is to send the above message to a few of the addresses at a time, each email addressed to one individual, as shown above. I may offer different combinations of services or information, or I may not.

There are services that will do the same thing, including sending out one email message once to a list of physicians. Based on what I’ve read, I think I have a chance of interesting 1 out of 500 physicians in my services. So that’s a total of 50 responses I’m expecting.

Why not send them to the whole list? One reason is it will cost less. Another reason is that sending out thousands of email at once will immediately mark me as a big-time scam artist. And, the best reason is I’ll be able to dribble my interests in a slow, deliberate way so that I can handle them all efficiently.

Watch and see what happens!

Griffith Publishing

Less than a century ago poems were handed around on torn pieces of paper, stories were told by firelight, and textbooks were re-bound to preserve their lives.

Now we have electronic publishing.

Even if your book is printed on paper with a hard-cover binding, it still depends on electronics. The words of the book need typesetting software. The design needs electronic formatting. The printers are computer driven.

These improvements have shortened the time line from concept to bookshelf and have improved the appearance of even poorly written books.

The content of books has also changed from words with your imagination filling in the details, to words supplemented by audio and video inserts, links to related Websites, and graphics that move, zoom and shrink in striking patterns.

Publishing is getting exciting, but not necessarily better. The twin of variety is confusion, and too many websites and online publications are a jumble of competing elements.

You’ll want to use sound and video for your online books that need to show or demonstrate someothing visual. Beyond that, words are what communication is all about.

If you’re running a long series of blogs on a given topic, try completing your project with a book formatted for printing. Whether you print it or make it available on line, it will be easier and faster to read, and much easier to understand.

Griffith Publishing

We had most of the files for a book an author wanted to reprint, but not all of them.

Then my printer said, “We can reprint any book in print.”

“You can?”

“Sure. Just send us a copy of the book that we can keep, and we’ll scan in the pages.”

“But they’re going to blur up and not print at high resolution.”

“There may be some loss in quality, but the average person won’t be able to detect it.”

So I took the plunge and reprinted a book entirely from scans of the pages as printed, and the book turned out beautifully.

Photos don’t scan wonderfully, but this book didn’t have any photos, and I couldn’t detect any degredation of quality.

For economical reprinting of books, let me know and I’ll run it through the process with my favorite printer and handle the whole thing. the scanning will cost you only a f ew dollars.

Everybody wins!

Call me if you’d like to see a copy of the book we reprinted before you decide to reprint with us. Call 800 359-9503 or send email to hodi@mindspring.com.

Brought to you by Griffith Publishing

“My mother told me to go outside, so that’s why I’m sitting on the sidewalk,” said Nicholas.

“My mother said, ‘Go outside,’ so that’s they I’m sitting on the sidewalk,” said Nicholas.

Why are their “double quotes” around the whole sentence at the top, but the next sentence has ’single quote’ around the words spoken. What’s going on?

Here’s the rule.

When the speaker says something, put double quotes around the exact words spoken. When the speaker quotes someone else while he or she is talking, put single quotes before and after the words someone else said.

Watch out for expressions like, She told me that… The words that follow are NOT a direct quote, so no quote marks are needed. This is called “indirect speech.”

Here are more examples of indirect speech:

The teacher said we were doing much better.
I asked why we couldn’t take a shortuct across the canyon.
Margie is always telling us how hard she worked on her class project.

Unless it is the exact words spoken, no quote marks, single or double.

If conversation by one person includes conversation by a second person, we use single quotes for the second person. For example…

“I don’t know,” Mary sobbed. “She stood there shaking her mop and shouted, ‘Get out!’ That’s all I heard! “

If you’re writing a serious paper or book that has a quote that covers more than one paragraph, you can handle it one of two ways:

Start each quoted paragraph with a double quote. End the last quoted paragraph with a double quote.

Indent the quoted text, all of it, so that it is clear that it’s all a quote.

DON”T DO BOTH!

In general, a short passage is included in the text with quote marks. After 20 or so lines, we like to see the whole quoted passage indented from the left and the right.

What is the person who is being quoted quotes someone else who quotes someone else? Wow! This could go on and on, but it does happen, especially when quoting Scripture or other text the includes text from other authorities.

“First person’s speech begins and ends with a double quote. ‘A quote inside the first person’s speech begins and ends with a single quote.’ ” If there is a second quote inside the first speech marked by single quotes, it has to go in double quotes. And so on.

Be sure to use quotes that are “curly” unless you’re using a font with letters that are straight or round such as Arial or Helvitica.

Have fun.

If you get stuck, send me email.

–by Griffith Publishing

More and more I am becoming convinced that niche marketing is the only way to make any income at all in self-publishing. Here’s how it has to work:

1. Define the exact group of people who will benefit from your book or other publications. That’s your niche.  Not “everybody.” Not “all senior citizens.” Maybe for you it would be “All people who give speeches as part of their business” or “Families that prefer mutts to pure-bred dogs.”
2. Find out if you can reach that group. This is the tough nut to crack. Can you get a list? Is there an organization that holds all of those people? Or does the group need an organization that you could establish?
3. Learn how you can get in touch with these people: e-mail, direct mail, Web page, telephone, ad in print media.  Build a plan and a budget to reach them.
4. Get acquainted with others aiming for the same target. Maybe you can join forces and increase your bang.
5. Write to that niche, not to the world in general. Be as helpful and interesting as you can. Make it possible for niche members to act on what you tell them to improve their lives or reach their individual goals. Give more than you get in terms of knowledge, insight, information.

That should get you started.

Griffith Publishing

Money isn’t that important to me, but it sure matters when taxes or insurance payments or something helps piles up and blocks all exits.

The projects most likely to be financially successful:

• Ghostwriting
• Physician Publishing
• Web design

For the above areas, I need all-new web page designs and sharper skills in web design.

Some templates look so cool. I’d be willing to buy a template if I could massacre it with changes I’d like to make. I don’t want to buy a template that looks like a template.

Dreamweaver, I’m ready. Everything I need to do in the future depends on my ability to merge my marketing needs with Dreamweaver’s capabilities.

One of my clients tells me it’s minus 28 where he is, and how am I doing?

Just fine. I’m in Idaho, and it’s about 60 degrees warmer here than at my client’s Minnesota office.

All of my primary web pages have been re-designed, and most of the glitches have been taken care of.

Principal project now is the “Mask” book. I think I have enough material and about 32,000 out of 50,000 words are written.

I do not like anything about the new “improved” WordPress. I’m sure the changes were made with good intentions, but what a pain to learn new routines when I’d just caught on to the old ones. Takes times, causes errors, and generally creates a dysfunctional relationship between WordPress and myself.
So here’s my business list of stuff to do…

• Pay bills
• Work on chapters for “The Mask”
• Plan next HealthWorks
• Suggestions to Mandy re submitted manuscripts

Guess that’s it. I am so intrigued by the quiet life. It’s hard to wind myself up to get things done.

For people like me who use web pages to deliver specific messages to people who matter to our business, learning the ropes for Dreamweaver can be daunting.

An IT wizard or a person who intuitively sees cause-and-effect and translates jargon into usable English has a fast ride.

For hobos like me with a laptop in my backpack, it’s just plain complicated to figure out what goes with what. Right now I have the impossible situation of opening a train wreck when I want to work with a Dreamweaver file.

There is absolutely no resemblance between what is on the screen with the program open and (1) what I want or (2) what is on the Web. Yes, I know about templates, about page design, about overrides, and even about CSS. But none of those tools makes any difference when I try to choose another font or go to bold face etc.

So I issue the commands, blow the page onto the web, and then, and only then, see the results of my labors.

WYSIWYG? Not at all. WYSInotWYG, ever.