Preparing to Publish a New Edition

Above is a graphic which I may possibly use on the front cover of the new edition of my fantasy novel THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER which I am hoping to publish some time this year.

The first edition was published way back in 1992 in the British market as a paperback book put out by Transworld Publishers under the Corgi imprint. Market demand for a new edition is probably going to be small, but there is, nevertheless, a readership for the book, to judge from the rather extravagant prices which are being asked for second-hand copies.

This is also the only book for which I receive occasional e-mail enquiries.
Assuming publication goes ahead, I will be making this book available to the public through lulu.com/hughcook.
I will not be buying a new ISBN for this book so it will not be available through outlets such as amazon.com. This is going to be a barebones production.

My sole capital investment in this project will amount to the sum of six New Zealand dollars, which is what I paid the local copy shop to scan the four maps which are part of the original edition and put the maps on a CD that I provided.

I have never used a scanner in my life, and I don't think I have any appropriate software. My married brother lives nearby and does have a scanner, so presumably I could get the scanning job done myself. But I've never had occasion to scan anything before and don't anticipate facing the necessity again, so thought it was simplest to get the copy shop to do the job.

The image at the top of this entry is one of the four maps, which was originally in black and white, but which I have colorized by using the Paint program which is in the Accessories section of my Windows XP setup.

I hate XP, which I class as the worst operating system I've ever used in my life, so bad that I have restored my computer to factory conditions four times in less than twelve months of ownership. However. Paint is, in my opinion, a great program for the simple uses I want to put it to.

THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER will be the fifth book for which I have designed a cover, the other four being the fantasy novel BAMBOO HORSES (a murder mystery with fantasy elements), my medical memoir CANCER PATIENT, my long alternative reality suicide bomber TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER (a book in which I unleashed the savage side of my sense of humor, throwing in a certain amount of torture and an extremely graphic and brutal killing) and my book of poems ARC OF LIGHT (sixty poems written between the years 1975 and 2005 inclusive).

To actually assemble the covers, I use a Microsoft program which was part of a package deal that I bought in a computer shop. I didn't think I'd have any need for it at all, but it has proved handy for making covers.

It's called Microsoft Photo Premium 10, and, though Microsoft is the company I love to hate, I have to say that this is a very nice piece of software.

In saying that, I should mention that I have a reasonably fast computer for which I purchased an extra gigabyte of RAM. The software might not perform as well on a slower box with less RAM.

How I make covers is to use the facility it has for making collages. You can slide images over each other, and it doesn't seem to matter what format the images are in -- jpeg, bitmap, portable network graphics or whatever.

You have the option of saving in a special variant of the portable network graphics format, and this special format gives you an image which you can subsequently manipulate again if you want to make adjustments.

To get an image in the exact size (as measured in pixels) required by lulu.com, I use Paint, which gives you the option of setting sizes in pixels (IMAGE -> ATTRIBUTES and then you can set the size in inches, centimeters or pixels).

I make a background image of exactly the right size as one slab of color -- blue for BAMBOO HORSES, for example, and gray for CANCER PATIENT -- and then slide the other images on top of this.

After playing around with fonts, I decided on Algerian for book titles and Engravers MT for my name. For the lettering on the spine, I accept the lulu.com default, which is Georgia. For my first three books I included the lulu.com logo on the cover, but for my book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT, I did not, and I won't with THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, either.

I feel that if this book is going to have an ISBN and is going to go out into the world to fend for itself, then a logo gives it more of the feel of a conventional published book, whereas if it's only available from the lulu.com site then there's no point in having that logo.

If anyone ever gets their hands on the printed book and wants to know where it comes from, well, there's a list of URLs at the front of each of my books, and one of them is lulu.com/hughcook.

To make the lettering for the book titles and my name, I use Microsoft Word and then capture them using a screen capture program, PrintKey.

Back in the days of the DOS operating system, which is what I started with, if you hit the "PrtSc" key (as it says on my ThinkPad) then hitting this "Print Key" key would dump what was on the screen to the printer.

That was very convenient. You could print what was on the screen simply by hitting that key.

For some reason, Windows does not have that functionality, but the PrintKey program enables the print screen key, making it a hot key to pop up the program, which lets you either print or copy the whole screen or part of it.

You can save what you capture in a number of graphics formats, and you can also put a black frame around what you save, and control the width of the frame, which is handy if you are making maps.

This program works fine under Windows 98 but for some reason I had trouble making it work with Windows XP. Finally, experimentally, I found the executable, copied it and pasted it onto the desktop, upon which, lo and behold, it took the form of the familiar PrintKey icon.

Now, when I fire up the computer, the Print Screen key is not enabled. But, if I single-click on the logo on the desktop (I've chosen the single click option for my system) then the print screen key works to pop up the program.

This is handy for saving those rare Internet pages which, for some technical reason which is completely unknown to me, refuse to let you save them in the ordinary way. Why someone would be bloody-minded enough to go and design an Internet page which can't be saved I have no idea, but PrintKey is one way to work around the problem.

The other graphics program I have and use a lot is Irfan View, which is a superb piece of programming.

The version I have invites you to "support Irfan View" by installing eBay toolbars; legitimately enough, the guy who wrote this software is trying to make a buck out of it, and good luck to him. However, you can uncheck that option. I'm personally never going to buy anything on eBay so I did uncheck it.

The software gives you the option, on installing, to associate it with a range of stuff, and I personally chose to associate it with all graphics formats.

It can handle pretty much any graphics format that exists, and can resize images and can save them in various formats.

With PNG and JGP images you have compression options. JPG images can be saved with a quality ranging from 100 to all the way down. I've found that for simple images I can get away with a quality of ten, and sometimes five, which makes for very lean images which load quickly. (We have to remember that not everyone has a broadband connection.)

So, with a combination of Microsoft Word, PrintKey, Paint, Microsoft Photo Premium 10 and Irfan View and Irfan View, I've become pretty much the total image warrior.

I wanted a red background for THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER. My plan was to make a red background using Paint and then use white type in a Microsoft Word document with a red background to make my name and the book title, then cut out the name and title with PrintKey and slide them onto the cover using Microsoft Photo Premium 10.

But how was I to match the red of my Word document with the red of Paint?

This is not easy to figure out when you look at the ridiculously small squares of color you have to choose from, particularly not if, like me, your eyesight has been trashed by a combination of inflammatory conditions, the aftermath of eye surgery and optic nerve damage caused by brain cancer.

However, I hit on a simple solution.

I made my Word document, chose a suitable red as the background, then captured a rectangle of this using PrintKey, saving it in bitmap format. I then opened that saved rectangle with Irfan View and increased the size to the desired dimensions. That meant I could bypass Paint and did not have the problem of matching the Paint color with the Word color.

I used the same process to make a cover for what I plan will be my second book of poems. The title is THE DEATH OF BIRDS and my concept for the book is that the black cover will be totally black, the spine will beard the legend "Poems by Hugh Cook" in white print on a black background, and the front cover will feature the title, again in white print. Apart from that, the front cover will be totally black.

Not exactly a fun concept, I know, but this is not going to be a book of happy poems about peanut butter sandwiches. Rather, it is going to be a book of poems on the topic of my death, an event which, quite possibly, may happen this year, though I'm hoping it will not.

The reason I chose to work on a second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER was that I thought this would be an efficient way to fill a brief window of opportunity. According to my plan, I had a short period of free time available to me. I was planning to head back to Japan following more than a year spent receiving medical treatment for brain cancer and its consequences, a course of treatment involving neurosurgery in the form of a brain biopsy, chemotherapy, radiation therapy in the form of a dose of a total of thirty grays to the brain, and, on each eye, a vitrectomy -- a jelly-removal operation -- and the removal of a cataract and the implantation of an intraocular lens focused at infinity.

I did not have enough time to take on a major creative project, but I figured I did have time sufficient to format the 250,000 words or so of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, which I already had as a series of HTML files, as I had the entire novel available on my Zenvirus.com website on a "read for free online" basis.

The maps I could get scanned, the cover design should prove no problem, and the front matter would not take long to write.

The big problem was the format.

The original Corgi paperback is very expertly done and I have no quarrel with it, but I did not want to replicate the extremely small font used because I personally find it too small. I wanted to go with Garamond at 12 point, which I used for my first four print-on-demand books, and which suits me fine.

(Lulu.com offers a template featuring Garamond at 11 point.)

So I wanted a larger font, but the Corgi paperback exceeds 700 pages, and the technical limit for the print-on-demand process that lulu.com offers is 740 pages.

TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER was about 200,000 words in Garamond 12 point with a space between each paragraph and went right up to that 740-page limit.

THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER is 50,000 pages longer, and, though I could compress it by eliminating the spaces between the paragraphs (which is something I intend to do) it would still exceed the limit.

I could have split WITCHLORD into three separate volumes, but I didn't want to do that. I was written as a complete story to be read as a self-contained unit, and that is the way it works best.

Besides, I'm tired of having my books butchered into small fragments, something American publishers did with a couple of the early books in my fantasy series. They weren't written to be chopped up and sold by the ounce like dogmeat.

So, finally, with some reluctance, I opted to go not for the standard 6 inch by 9 inch paperback format but for the larger option, 8.5 inch by 11 inches.

I put a margin of 1.5 inches all round the page, left and right and top and bottom, so three of the eight inches of width ends up being white space.

(That sound you hear is the agony of dying trees.)

This makes for a line which is five inches long, and this seems (I've looked at a few sample lines, but I haven't comprehensively investigated the result) to cause the average line to hold three more words than usual.

I figure that some readers might find it uncomfortable to read a line so long, and I did consider the option of putting the text into columns. But, while I've read science fiction magazines that were arranged in columns, I've never seen a novel published that way, and I decided that a wider page would be less eccentric than doing the thing as columns.

So I figured that it would be easy enough to get WITCHLORD done in the time remaining, and that it would be worth doing it to satisfy market demand, even assuming that market demand is, to be realistic, perhaps fewer people on planet Earth than you would need to have a decent beer party.

So my plan (and it seemed a pretty straightforward plan to me) was that i could do the book on the cheap in some free time for which I had no other use, then head back to Japan, go look for a job and start earning again.

THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, then, was to be the last product of my career as a professional cancer patient, and I was glad of it.

You can get a lot of creative work done if you're incarcerated on the cancer ward and can't go nightclubbing because you're hooked up to an intravenous drip for days at a time (typically, in my case, it was five days in bed at a stretch) but, given the choice, I'd rather go to the office and work nine to five, thank you very much.

So my thesis was, okay, get WITCHLORD done then go back to Japan and, in the coming year, maybe write the occasional haiku.

But, while I was hard at work on WITCHLORD, I went to my eye surgeon for one last post-operative check on my eyes, and he was alarmed by the deteriorating in my vision, and I ended up going to hospital for checks which indicated that perhaps my brain cancer had returned.

I had been warned that the balance of probabilities was that it would return. And it had been made clear to me (the information was not volunteered, but was extracted from the informant under interrogation) that if the cancer were to return then the probability was that I would die.

As a general rule, for this kind of cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, it is not possible to achieve a second remission.

So, at this writing, I don't know for a fact that the cancer has returned, but I'm already taking oral steroids which my cancer doctor has prescribed for me to try to reverse my latest eyesight problems, which are quite possibly the consequence of a swelling in the brain.

I should have tests shortly which should answer the cancer question definitively. Meantime, my planned return to Japan has been cancelled, and I'm beginning to think I may never again get there.

So my new plan is that after I've finished WITCHLORD and have uploaded it, I will focus in on my second book of poems, THE DEATH OF BIRDS, a project which should be doable in the time remaining to me, whatever that time may be.

In the worst possible analysis, I will probably get at least a few months. And, on top of that, the possibility of surviving longer is still possible. Though a second remission is generally not possible, it can be attempted, and is sometimes achieved. And, if I can achieve it, I may live for another twenty years or so.

If I do survive, then I'm going to end up experiencing early aging, since it has been explained to me that the dose of radiation that I received to my brain will probably be experienced in that manner, with mental degeneration which I might reasonably have expected to experience thirty years in the future cutting in earlier.

How much earlier, nobody can tell me.

So there it is.

Having had a whole year to wrap my head around the notion that I might quite possibly die of cancer, I feel I'm handling the experience reasonably well. And I don't feel that I have any option but to go forward.

At this writing, I'm thinking that I could quite possibly have the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER on sale at lulu.com/hughcook some time in March of this year, or perhaps even a little earlier.