One of my trade publishers unceremoniously dumped one of my books & reverted the rights to me, and I want to get it back in print asap (via Createspace?) due to demand from teachers who use it in curriculum. (There are no used copies available anywhere on the Internet at a reasonable cost.) I can't do the work myself, and I've already spent days and days just spinning my wheels trying to find someone to do it for me. Obviously I'm willing to pay, but I don't want to be an idiot about it. I want someone reasonable and reputable. Also - embarrassed to admit this, but I only have the book in its hardcover form. I wrote it several computers ago, and my publisher has so far ignored my request about obtaining the electronic file from them. Thanks for any suggestions/advice, etc!!
How to find reputable person to get my book ready for self publishing?
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There are a couple decent OCR programs you can use to convert a scanned image to text, though that's still quite a pain and hopefully it doesn't come to that.
Did you ever e-mail the complete manuscript to your publisher? If so, check your "sent" folder in your e-mail for it. If not, any chance of yanking the hard drive from the old computer and putting it in a new one just to get the files off?
I believe your best bet with self-publishing to hire people to individually do the jobs you need (cover design, formatting) rather than hire one company to do it all. But I'm sure there are others with much more experience that can offer suggestions.
Thanks, Katrina. No, never emailed this particular ms because at the time of publication (2004) the pub'r was still doing everything on paper! Hard to believe, huh? I was wondering about getting it off the old computer, but then again that wouldn't have any of the editing on it, either. Ugh. Thanks for your input!
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That's an excellent point about the editing. I can tell from reading a lot on Kindle that some books look like they were scanned using OCR, and some mistakes were left in the finished product. OCR can mistake commas for periods and vice-versa, lower case L (l) for lower case "i", etc. You would need someone with eagle eyes to proofread the OCR copy if you want it 100% defect-free. If you can't get the publisher to send you a copy of the edited book, then OCR will probably be the fastest way to get an initial draft.
I'm subscribing to your thread to see what people recommend. I'd like to be able to pass the answers on to my local writers' group.
I've dealt with this before and here's the best workflow I know of:
Scan your book in using the highest-possible quality. Ideally, cut the binding and scan at high DPI. If you can't cut the binding, set up the best book-scanning rig with cameras you can afford.
Run the images you end up with through scantailor, a free software that will process the images into very readable text.
Alternatively, you can run a batch edit through Photoshop, but not everyone has access to Photoshop.
Next, use Adobe Acrobat Professional (I think it costs about $100) to run OCR on the images. It's the best OCR software I know of. You can also use Adobe Acrobat to crop out the header and footer of the document, as these will render improperly in word (next step)
You can then copy and paste the text out to Microsoft Word.
In Microsoft word, you'll have to a do a lot of replacement of goofy characters and weird formatting things: stuff like page breaks, page numbers, etc. etc. I usually will replace all instances of multiple breaks (^p^p code in Word) with single breaks. Some other Word-Ninjary helps.
Next, take the text and reformat it into the right format for CreateSpace. This can be a pain, but it's relatively easy compared to the PDF conversion part.
Hope that helps and feel free to ask more specifics,
Kevin
Scan your book in using the highest-possible quality. Ideally, cut the binding and scan at high DPI. If you can't cut the binding, set up the best book-scanning rig with cameras you can afford.
Run the images you end up with through scantailor, a free software that will process the images into very readable text.
Alternatively, you can run a batch edit through Photoshop, but not everyone has access to Photoshop.
Next, use Adobe Acrobat Professional (I think it costs about $100) to run OCR on the images. It's the best OCR software I know of. You can also use Adobe Acrobat to crop out the header and footer of the document, as these will render improperly in word (next step)
You can then copy and paste the text out to Microsoft Word.
In Microsoft word, you'll have to a do a lot of replacement of goofy characters and weird formatting things: stuff like page breaks, page numbers, etc. etc. I usually will replace all instances of multiple breaks (^p^p code in Word) with single breaks. Some other Word-Ninjary helps.
Next, take the text and reformat it into the right format for CreateSpace. This can be a pain, but it's relatively easy compared to the PDF conversion part.
Hope that helps and feel free to ask more specifics,
Kevin
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If you're talking about basically straight text typing, finding a typist willing to retype the manuscript may be the quickest way to get a basic text document. If they don't have to do anything except copy exactly what is there, it would go quickly. Especially since there is no handwriting to try and decipher! Formatting/typesetting would still need to be done, but you'd have a clean text document to start from. That is priceless!
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