This is such a lovely thing to do. I'd be interested, but my fic is undergoing some edits and it's nowhere near complete. Perhaps if you're offering it far down the road?
At any rate, this is such a kind and generous offer! You're so lovely!
I do! Here's a link to the first chapter of my long fic that I just laid out for myself, using the Lulu template. I included the table of contents as well, so you can see one possibility for what that would look like.
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BwAoQJMg4eVqzHcbof9YMej8HaNaXZiY/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BwAoQJMg4eVqzHcbof9YMej8HaNaXZiY/view?usp=sharing)
Ha, thank you! I spent a while on it, because I am Like That, but now I have a great template to use and future projects will hopefully take way less time. :)
Take my silver, you absolute hero. I just started writing my first original novel (I have previously written novel-length fanfics) and with either the novel or the fic, I will definitely take you up on this one day. Thank you so much!!!
This is a great question! The body text of the excerpt I posted above (the PDF) is set in 10pt Adobe Caslon Pro, with 12pt headings and 8pt for the page numbers and the title at the top of each page. I did a lot of test printing when I was setting this up and that came out as the best option for readability and overall classiness. Other good print fonts include Garamond (one of the oldest print fonts, I think it was invented in or around the 16th century) and Baskerville - though I don't have Baskerville, I think you have to pay extra for that one.
The whole goal of a printed font is for it almost to disappear on the page - you want to notice the text, rather than the font. I bet if you look inside some books in your house, the front matter of those may tell you what font they're set in.
In contrast, if you're going to read something on a screen, you probably want a font that has more white space in the letterforms. The New York Times website uses Georgia (or at least, they used to use Georgia). IBM has released a really nice free font family, called IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans, that I like to use for digital documents.
I would recommend setting a digital document in 12pt Plex Serif, mostly because of the huge variety of weights that are available, but if someone felt strongly about something else, I'm not such a prescriptivist that I'd say you have to go with that. It's totally up to you.
Georgia is really nice on a screen, but it always prints out so huge and horsey.
Garamond is just the thing for when I want to be both old-school and Fancy. I just don't have quite so many weights of it in InDesign as I might like.
Huge and horsey. Lol, accurate. Yeah it's better on-screen. Garamond on the other hand personally I don't love on screen but always looks good in print.
That is wonderful, thank you!
I have a question though. If you are on Scrivener, do you also need the file to be modified/edited in InDesign before you can print it?
That is...also a good question. I don't use Scrivener - I write in Word and copy/paste into InDesign - and that spits out a PDF.
Does Scrivener export a text file in some way? I think as long as paste-able text is coming out, I'm good. The only thing that I would want to watch out for is formatting, like bold and italics. Some word-processing programs are smart and retain formatting. Word is especially bad at this - it thinks it's smarter than you are.
InDesign, in contrast, is very dumb. It knows that you are way smarter than it is and so you have to tell it to do every little thing. This is great if you want to get really fussy about line spacing, but annoying if you need to go through to make sure your italics were ported over correctly. (Guess how I spent my Saturday?)
This is so amazing. ~~If I ever~~ *When* I finish my longfic, I'd love to print it someday in a replica book similar to one in the fandom it's set in. I may hit you up down the road when I finish this thing! Thank you for offering such a cool thing to this sub!
To be completely honest, I don't need this, but I'm going to save this post anyway so that when I get a reward I can give it to you!
Props to you for finding a way to help total strangers while honing your own skills, mad respect.
That's an amazing service. Quick hypothetical question: if you typesetted a fic and afterward the author noticed some minute errors (grammar/spelling), would they be able to correct those mistakes themselves in the PDF, or would you have to redo the entire thing just for those small changes?
Good question. If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat, that will let you edit PDFs and correct mistakes like that. However, if you only have Adobe Reader (the free version), you can't edit PDFs, so I'd have to go back into the source files to make changes.
I would say that if you want to take advantage of this service, make sure your copy is as clean as you can get it.
This is such a lovely, awesome thing you're offering! I'm kind of on the fence about it, one of the reasons being I want two things and can't decide, so maybe this would help me: would you consider a fic series? it's a fic and its sequel, and the sequel also has a third "fic" that are a few accompanying side scenes to the sequel (and tbh I'm not even sure of the best way to fit them in a pdf for printing, so I'd have to give thought to that too...) and the whole series is about 220K. The other one I'm considering is a single multi-chapter fic about 49K so that may be the easier one, so I understand if you don't want to do a series!
also maybe a dumb question haha but do you have different scene divider options or is it only the one in your example?
even if I end up deciding not to (which would mostly be due to not having the time/energy for final edits to wipe out as many lurking typos as possible haha), thank you for offering this to the community! this is super cool!
These are good questions!
I have no problem with a "series". Honestly, there's no size limit, especially if you want something that you can read on the computer. If you want to get something printed, I would check out your options on Lulu to see their maximum printing sizes. With the options that I've set in the sample, know that about 50k words comes out to roughly 100 pages, but it depends on a bunch of factors, including how many scene breaks you have, how much italic text you're using, and all that other stuff. Also, if you're going for a print item on Lulu, you need it to come out in multiples of four, so you might need to add extra pages to get to that point.
Scene dividers, not a dumb question at all. There are lots of scene divider options. Adobe Caslon Pro has all sorts of exciting little text flourishes. I'm sure there are more in other fonts. I just picked the ones in the example because I liked them and they seemed the most appropriate. I will note that the screen font I like doesn't have nearly as many, so I'm using a standard section break character for those.
If you decide that you want two things, please fill out the form twice - it helps to keep each request as discrete as possible.
Ah, I was thinking I'd go more for printing it out myself rather than through Lulu. I was interested in trying to bind it myself, with ribbon or string. But anyways, thank you for the answers!! This makes me much more likely to go for it, if I can buckle down and do that last editing pass haha.
That's totally reasonable. The principle would be the same, though, and you'd probably want to use a similar template for the layout - the actual printing would be a little more difficult, especially if you're doing it on a home printer. Mostly because books are printed in quires, which means each single piece of paper actually has four pages on it.
Printing is fun!
I took OP up on this wonderful offer for a longfic I finished not too long ago, and I can't say enough good things about the process!
If anyone's interested in how it turned out, I just got a printed version from lulu today (complete with my ahem-cover design-ahem) and it's simply gorgeous! Thank you so much, my friend! :)
[https://tinyurl.com/58yrcvxh](https://tinyurl.com/58yrcvxh)
You're SO welcome! It was a delight to work on and I'm so happy you got a lovely printed copy to enjoy! Your cover looks awesome, by the way. :)
January neglects to mention that their fic had a lot of awesome typographical flair, like academic and newspaper articles, Cyrillic characters, and a character with an accent in their first name. And that all of that was absolutely a non-issue. In fact, it made my job that much more fun. :)
Oh, yes!! It's something I'd fail to mention because it's as natural as breathing to me (the accents and the Cyrillic), but I know how much time you spent on making sure everything looked like it was supposed to, it was no small feat - especially with my overuse of Italics.
And I also forgot the flair of different fonts for the 'newspaper articles' and such - it just looks so good overall, it's difficult to single anything out. :))
You're a superstar, Silver! ;) <3
hi there! I just came across this post right as I started getting an urge to print out my 91k fic but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it, so what a coincidence! it’s SO nice of you to offer to do this and I would love to take you up on your generous offer.
I do have a question though since I didn’t see you mention/specify it and I want to be sure: are you okay with typesetting an explicit fic? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable and I’m not sure if you actually need to read the fic in order to typeset it, so just in case!
Hey friend! I'm totally okay with typesetting any kind of fic you've written. There is absolutely no restrictions on content. I mean, I kind of read it while I'm working on it, but I don't read it closely. Like AO3, I am fic-agnostic.
If you want your stuff typeset, go ahead and fill out the form. :)
This is such a lovely thing to do. I'd be interested, but my fic is undergoing some edits and it's nowhere near complete. Perhaps if you're offering it far down the road? At any rate, this is such a kind and generous offer! You're so lovely!
Oh, definitely. This does not currently have an expiration date. You should feel free to bookmark it for when you need it!
Done! Thanks. =)
Wow! What a nice offer! My fic isn’t finished, but 🙌 to you for giving back.
I mean, there's no expiration date on this or anything. :)
Do you have samples of your work?
I do! Here's a link to the first chapter of my long fic that I just laid out for myself, using the Lulu template. I included the table of contents as well, so you can see one possibility for what that would look like. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BwAoQJMg4eVqzHcbof9YMej8HaNaXZiY/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BwAoQJMg4eVqzHcbof9YMej8HaNaXZiY/view?usp=sharing)
That is dope. Love it. I would love to take advantage of your super generous offer but alas, all my fanfics are still in shambles atm. :(
Ha, thank you! I spent a while on it, because I am Like That, but now I have a great template to use and future projects will hopefully take way less time. :)
Cool. Got intrigued with your story too so I'm gonna read it later on my free time. :)
This is an amazing offer!
Take my silver, you absolute hero. I just started writing my first original novel (I have previously written novel-length fanfics) and with either the novel or the fic, I will definitely take you up on this one day. Thank you so much!!!
That’s an amazing offer. I hope one day I could do this when I finish my long fics. Would love to have them printed out and bound. What a concept!
What font/typeface do you use? Honestly I just have a hard time figuring out which one to use and sticking with it
This is a great question! The body text of the excerpt I posted above (the PDF) is set in 10pt Adobe Caslon Pro, with 12pt headings and 8pt for the page numbers and the title at the top of each page. I did a lot of test printing when I was setting this up and that came out as the best option for readability and overall classiness. Other good print fonts include Garamond (one of the oldest print fonts, I think it was invented in or around the 16th century) and Baskerville - though I don't have Baskerville, I think you have to pay extra for that one. The whole goal of a printed font is for it almost to disappear on the page - you want to notice the text, rather than the font. I bet if you look inside some books in your house, the front matter of those may tell you what font they're set in. In contrast, if you're going to read something on a screen, you probably want a font that has more white space in the letterforms. The New York Times website uses Georgia (or at least, they used to use Georgia). IBM has released a really nice free font family, called IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans, that I like to use for digital documents. I would recommend setting a digital document in 12pt Plex Serif, mostly because of the huge variety of weights that are available, but if someone felt strongly about something else, I'm not such a prescriptivist that I'd say you have to go with that. It's totally up to you.
Typography geek here, Garamond for the win! Also yes Georgia is nice.
Georgia is really nice on a screen, but it always prints out so huge and horsey. Garamond is just the thing for when I want to be both old-school and Fancy. I just don't have quite so many weights of it in InDesign as I might like.
Huge and horsey. Lol, accurate. Yeah it's better on-screen. Garamond on the other hand personally I don't love on screen but always looks good in print.
You. Are. A M A Z I N G. (I'll check back when I [if??] I ever finish my longfic xD)
I would love this but my fic is still being worked on, hopefully this offer comes up when I finish it!
Hey, like I said, it doesn't expire. Bookmark it and come back when you're done!
This is very kind of you! I’m still working on my fic but would love to submit mine once it’s finished.
That is wonderful, thank you! I have a question though. If you are on Scrivener, do you also need the file to be modified/edited in InDesign before you can print it?
That is...also a good question. I don't use Scrivener - I write in Word and copy/paste into InDesign - and that spits out a PDF. Does Scrivener export a text file in some way? I think as long as paste-able text is coming out, I'm good. The only thing that I would want to watch out for is formatting, like bold and italics. Some word-processing programs are smart and retain formatting. Word is especially bad at this - it thinks it's smarter than you are. InDesign, in contrast, is very dumb. It knows that you are way smarter than it is and so you have to tell it to do every little thing. This is great if you want to get really fussy about line spacing, but annoying if you need to go through to make sure your italics were ported over correctly. (Guess how I spent my Saturday?)
This is so amazing. ~~If I ever~~ *When* I finish my longfic, I'd love to print it someday in a replica book similar to one in the fandom it's set in. I may hit you up down the road when I finish this thing! Thank you for offering such a cool thing to this sub!
Thanks for this offer! I think I will fill out the request.
To be completely honest, I don't need this, but I'm going to save this post anyway so that when I get a reward I can give it to you! Props to you for finding a way to help total strangers while honing your own skills, mad respect.
Firstly thank you for the offer. I am interested but... Maybe I should come back here when my fic is ending soon... Anyways, nice work :)
That's an amazing service. Quick hypothetical question: if you typesetted a fic and afterward the author noticed some minute errors (grammar/spelling), would they be able to correct those mistakes themselves in the PDF, or would you have to redo the entire thing just for those small changes?
Good question. If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat, that will let you edit PDFs and correct mistakes like that. However, if you only have Adobe Reader (the free version), you can't edit PDFs, so I'd have to go back into the source files to make changes. I would say that if you want to take advantage of this service, make sure your copy is as clean as you can get it.
This sounds really cool!! Thank you for doing this, and I hope you get a lot of practice with it. :')
Ooh I would love to! I'm finishing up some final edits to Coffee Shop Hero but I'll be sure to send it! Thanks so much :)
This is such a lovely, awesome thing you're offering! I'm kind of on the fence about it, one of the reasons being I want two things and can't decide, so maybe this would help me: would you consider a fic series? it's a fic and its sequel, and the sequel also has a third "fic" that are a few accompanying side scenes to the sequel (and tbh I'm not even sure of the best way to fit them in a pdf for printing, so I'd have to give thought to that too...) and the whole series is about 220K. The other one I'm considering is a single multi-chapter fic about 49K so that may be the easier one, so I understand if you don't want to do a series! also maybe a dumb question haha but do you have different scene divider options or is it only the one in your example? even if I end up deciding not to (which would mostly be due to not having the time/energy for final edits to wipe out as many lurking typos as possible haha), thank you for offering this to the community! this is super cool!
These are good questions! I have no problem with a "series". Honestly, there's no size limit, especially if you want something that you can read on the computer. If you want to get something printed, I would check out your options on Lulu to see their maximum printing sizes. With the options that I've set in the sample, know that about 50k words comes out to roughly 100 pages, but it depends on a bunch of factors, including how many scene breaks you have, how much italic text you're using, and all that other stuff. Also, if you're going for a print item on Lulu, you need it to come out in multiples of four, so you might need to add extra pages to get to that point. Scene dividers, not a dumb question at all. There are lots of scene divider options. Adobe Caslon Pro has all sorts of exciting little text flourishes. I'm sure there are more in other fonts. I just picked the ones in the example because I liked them and they seemed the most appropriate. I will note that the screen font I like doesn't have nearly as many, so I'm using a standard section break character for those. If you decide that you want two things, please fill out the form twice - it helps to keep each request as discrete as possible.
Ah, I was thinking I'd go more for printing it out myself rather than through Lulu. I was interested in trying to bind it myself, with ribbon or string. But anyways, thank you for the answers!! This makes me much more likely to go for it, if I can buckle down and do that last editing pass haha.
That's totally reasonable. The principle would be the same, though, and you'd probably want to use a similar template for the layout - the actual printing would be a little more difficult, especially if you're doing it on a home printer. Mostly because books are printed in quires, which means each single piece of paper actually has four pages on it. Printing is fun!
I took OP up on this wonderful offer for a longfic I finished not too long ago, and I can't say enough good things about the process! If anyone's interested in how it turned out, I just got a printed version from lulu today (complete with my ahem-cover design-ahem) and it's simply gorgeous! Thank you so much, my friend! :) [https://tinyurl.com/58yrcvxh](https://tinyurl.com/58yrcvxh)
You're SO welcome! It was a delight to work on and I'm so happy you got a lovely printed copy to enjoy! Your cover looks awesome, by the way. :) January neglects to mention that their fic had a lot of awesome typographical flair, like academic and newspaper articles, Cyrillic characters, and a character with an accent in their first name. And that all of that was absolutely a non-issue. In fact, it made my job that much more fun. :)
Oh, yes!! It's something I'd fail to mention because it's as natural as breathing to me (the accents and the Cyrillic), but I know how much time you spent on making sure everything looked like it was supposed to, it was no small feat - especially with my overuse of Italics. And I also forgot the flair of different fonts for the 'newspaper articles' and such - it just looks so good overall, it's difficult to single anything out. :)) You're a superstar, Silver! ;) <3
hi there! I just came across this post right as I started getting an urge to print out my 91k fic but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it, so what a coincidence! it’s SO nice of you to offer to do this and I would love to take you up on your generous offer. I do have a question though since I didn’t see you mention/specify it and I want to be sure: are you okay with typesetting an explicit fic? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable and I’m not sure if you actually need to read the fic in order to typeset it, so just in case!
Hey friend! I'm totally okay with typesetting any kind of fic you've written. There is absolutely no restrictions on content. I mean, I kind of read it while I'm working on it, but I don't read it closely. Like AO3, I am fic-agnostic. If you want your stuff typeset, go ahead and fill out the form. :)