Ben Jeapes of Big Engine

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Lightning Strikes Twice, Or Thrice, Or ...

Ben Jeapes - owner of Big Engine - ruminates about the pain and joy of setting up a new science fiction book publishing company.

Be warned that this is a disillusioned convert speaking, so I might not be as fair-minded and balanced as some would like. But I'll try to give credit where credit is due.

Ben Jeapes of Big Engine Last year I wrote a piece for the Snarl (SF/F art publisher Paper Tiger’s customer ezine; Ed) on the trials of setting up a small press publishing company, Big Engine, and I ended on the optimistic note that it looked as if print-on-demand might be the answer to my problems.

Three books on, let's look at the experiences so far.

The PoD operation in question was Lightning Source Inc. (henceforth LSI), who were opening a UK office (henceforth LSUK) and hustling for business. On paper it looked irresistible.

Small runs of books can be printed cheaply and quickly: you supply a PDF file for the text and a TIF file for the cover, and that's all that's needed. None of the tedious making of films, plates, etc., that traditional printers will insist on and which push up the price.

Cost and convenience apart, what clinched the deal was that all the titles in their system would be fed automatically into Bertrams (in the UK) and Ingrams (in the US), and thence into Amazon. Double, triple your marketing reach at a stroke without even trying!

The fly in the ointment was, and has continued to be, LSI. LSUK has yet to open its UK printing facility, due to contractual difficulties with the landlord of its proposed site. The staff there, however, have always impressed me with their commitment to detail and their efficiency. Problem is, all the printing is still being done by LSI.

I sent my first book, The Leaky Establishment by David Langford, direct to LSI in Tennessee. It took over a fortnight to arrive: airmail direct to the US, then a slow mule train to Memphis. But that's the US post office, not LSI. All further communications have been sent to LSUK and FedExed to LSI, so that particular obstacle has been overcome.

Because I had been led to believe LSI could print only in US sizes, the cover was supplied at 9in x 5.7in, the nearest US equivalent to demy octavo (216mm x 140mm). It turned out LSI had sneakily acquired the ability to print in UK sizes, so the book came out at 216mm x 140mm but with a slightly larger 9in x 5.7in cover image!

Hence about half a centimetre of cover image was trimmed off around the edges, and the text panels that should have been centred were distinctly off-centre. The Big Engine logo at the top of the front cover was reduced to a bare set of wheels. The author kindly advised everyone he knew that, at all costs, no one should refer to the company from now on as Big Bogeys.

It was a glitch, a glitch. It was only a proof copy that had been printed like this: we supplied a cover at the UK size and The Leaky Establishment was duly printed with a short run.

For title no. 2, Bad Timing & Other Stories by Molly Brown, I thought everything had been sorted out, all lessons learnt, so I didn't order a proof copy. Fortunately LSI provided one anyway. This time everything we supplied was the right size, but LSI printed the book a size too small . . . though again printing the text and the cover at the original size, hence distorting the whole thing.

What was especially infuriating about this was, not just that they had done it, but that it meant the book wasn't ready for a particular convention at which the author was appearing. I could at least display a wrongly sized copy to prove the thing existed in one form or another.

I'm ashamed to say it took the author herself to spot the second flaw with the proof copy -- all the blank pages had been omitted. The reverse half-title page was meant to be blank, and other blanks appeared occasionally throughout the book so that each story in the collection started on a recto (right-hand page).

Without those blanks, of course, the pagination was all over the place. This fault was traced back to us: when the PDF file was produced, the option to include blank pages (which is apparently left out by default) hadn't been checked.

A PDF with blanks was duly produced and shipped off to LSI. A proof copy came back. It was the right size! It had the blanks! But . . . Well, credit where credit is due. LSI themselves noticed that it had two faint dotted lines down the spine, where the typesetter had omitted to turn off the crop marks on the image. A corrected cover image, minus crop marks, was duly sent.

Back came the third proof copy, with no dotted lines, with blank pages, and . . . the wrong size. Again.

Meanwhile the third title, The Ant-Men of Tibet & Other Stories by Stephen Baxter, was going through the system. The typesetter provided the cover TIF and text PDF on the same CD. I noticed that, again, the PDF didn't have the blank pages. Rather than trust the post from Brighton, which had taken up to a week for a first-class package before now, I asked him to e-mail a corrected PDF.

This came (with blank pages) and, as I don't have a CD burner, I put it onto a floppy. I sent the CD and the floppy to LSI, following all their required conventions according to their Digital Media Submission Form, with a covering letter clearly stating (in case there was still any doubt) they should "use the TIF on the CD and the PDF on the floppy".

But, no prizes for guessing which PDF they chose to use. So along came the proof copy, the right size, no dotted lines . . . and no blank pages.

All these problems have now been resolved, I hasten to add; all three books have finally been printed properly. But, in case anyone got lost in that catalogue of woes, here's a tabular history of the errors with each book:

Leaky Establishment: Cover the wrong size

Bad Timing: Book the wrong size (1)

Bad Timing contd.: Blank pages omitted (BE's fault)

Bad Timing contd.: Crop marks on cover (BE's fault)

Bad Timing contd.: Book the wrong size (2)

Ant-Men: Blank pages omitted

LSI is ahead in the faults, as you can see, and, of the two that were Big Engine's fault, LSI noticed only one themselves. Every other fault was discovered only when a proof copy was sent to me; no one at that end spotted it, even something so obvious as pagination being out of order.

The strength and the weakness of PoD is that the machinery involved is essentially a glorified photocopier which anyone can operate . . . and anyone does. I've never known a traditional printer that would have let any of these slips get past the initial set-up stage, let alone an actual printed copy.

But that isn't the end of it.

I mentioned the added advantage of using LSI -- the automatic feed into Amazon. Due to a glitch in LSI's computers, it has emerged in the past few days that all their PoD titles have been declared unavailable to Amazon. I learnt this when Bad Timing's author called to say that Amazon had unilaterally cancelled all its back orders.

And that, as they say, is the last straw. The fact that Amazon hadn't actually checked the availability of the title with me, the publisher, is irrelevant to the subject of LSI, and I'm working on trying to get Amazon to reinstate the titles, or at least tell their customers they were mistaken (ever try to wrestle with a jelly?). But the blame can be traced back, ultimately, to yet another cock-up by LSI.

I still believe in the philosophy of PoD: it's going to work. There's no doubt that LSI will take its place in history as the company that woke the printing world up to the possibilities of PoD. The technology is there, the dream is plausible.

Unfortunately LSI are to the dream what Torquemada was to the Sermon on the Mount. Fortunately, traditional printers are waking up to the fact of PoD and I've already been getting competitive quotes for short runs that match or are actually cheaper than LSI's prices. As I've said before, the LSUK staff do impress me and it's possible that I'll reconsider when they finally open their own printing facility. I don't want to close any doors forever.

But LSI? No, I think not.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Snarl, Paper Tiger’s reader zine. Many thanks to Big Engine’s proprietor Ben Jeapes (www.bigengine.co.uk), and the Snarl’s Editor extraordinaire, Paul Barnett (www.papertiger.co.uk), for letting us recycle their prose.

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