Scanning Photo Negatives for Use in a Print Book

The general rule in scanning photos for inclusion in a print book is that they be scanned at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. What’s important to understand is that means that the quality of the scan will be acceptable if it is printed at exactly the same size as the original. A 4”x6” photo scanned at 300dpi can be printed at 4”x 6” or smaller in the book. But that’s only part of the story. If you want to enlarge the photo size in the book the original must be scanned at a much higher resolution. The Scantips.com website gives a good summary of the basics of the relationship of scanning dpi and print size in an article Pixels, Printers and Video – What’s With That?

When you want to include a large image in your book, Scantips, in an article, What About Film Scanners?, recommends working with the negative of the photo whenever possible. They advise, “The good answer for creating large images to print is to use a film scanner to scan the film instead of the prints. These are often called slide scanners, but they scan both slides or negatives. Most are for 35 mm film.” What’ important to realize when you do scan negatives is that they are often very small. For example, a 35 mm negative is 1.4 x 0.9 inch. As a consequence you will need to scan the negative at a much higher resolution so that you will get acceptable quality for the enlargement you will use in your book. Scantips recommends scanning the negative at 8 times the desired 300 dpi resolution for the printed image, or 2400 dpi.

Making sure that you get the original scans right will assure that you won’t be disappointed with the quality of the photos when it’s time to print your book.

Stories and Storytellers

The writer of fiction, the memoirist, and the family historian are all story tellers. To be sure, they tell stories differently. But in each literary form, the author is the teller of a tale. In that role what do these story tellers have in common?

It is instructive to see what two of our greatest contemporary storytellers have said about their art. E.L. Doctorow, winner of two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Ragtime (1975) and The March (2005) and The National Book Award (1985) for World’s Fair, focused on the nature of stories themselves in the Introduction of his 2006 book of essays titled Creationists. He wrote, “Stories…are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute suffering so that it can be borne.”

Michael Chabon, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay sees the storyteller in a somewhat different light. “…I read for entertainment and I write for entertainment,” says Chabon in an essay, Thoughts on the Modern Short Story in his 2008 collection Maps and Legends. He continues, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” The storyteller must seek “…to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two way exchange of attention, and the universal hunger for connection.”

One the one hand the author focuses on what is inherent in the story to discern its meaning and insight into the human experience. On the other the author focuses upon providing his audience with an engaging and entertaining experience. What makes the task of the author even more daunting, as I’m sure both Doctorow and Chabon would agree, is that the storyteller must maintain both lines of focus simultaneously.

How to Manage Photos for Your Self Published Book

Self publishing authors who are working on manuscripts often try to mix two steps of the process of creating a book – writing and book design. This is unfortunate, not to mention often frustrating. What happens is that these authors try to format their books in Microsoft Word and place their photos as they create their manuscript. When they edit the text the photos move from the spot they were originally placed. Word 2010 is better than previous versions, but the reality is that it’s not a tool for book design. A printer will ultimately require a manuscript designed in Adobe Creative Suite’s InDesign software. So let’s look at a better way to manage your photos as you create your book.

First, separate text from images by placing them in different folders. One folder contains only the text of your manuscript for each chapter and one only the images. (See illustration.) Assign a number to each photo.

Next, indicate in your text document where you want to place specific photos. An easy way to do this is to put three percentage signs (%%%) at the point in the text where you want to place a photo. Following the symbols simply add Photo #32 to indicate the image that belongs there. When it is time to create the book in InDesign it is very easy to use the Find/Replace tool to locate each photo placement and to insert the appropriate image and caption.

Whether you do your own work in InDesign or work with a professional book designer as most self publishing authors do you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration and time by using this system to manage your photos.

Fonts Are For Fun

This one's just for fun - geeky fun. As you know, part of book design is having an eye for fonts. How do we learn about fonts? If you're of an academic mind, the best book on the subject, ever, is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. You can learn about the history of type, structural forms, shaping the page, and much, much more. Bringhurst writes with such passion that you find yourself deeply engaged with the rules of acronyms and ellipses, ligatures and page proportions.

No? OK, then, how about playing a goofy game online instead? Check out www.typeconnection.com, a wonderfully designed site that lets you think about type in a whole new way. It's set up like The Dating Game, the old TV show. 

You pick your font and try to find a good connection for it. You need to choose a strategy for finding a good match - by (font) family, by (visual) similarities, or by dissimilarities, since "opposites attract",  or by shared history and influences - perhaps the same period or font foundry.

Next comes the part where you might actually learn a thing or two. Like the dating game, you skim the bios of the fonts competing for a match. Pick one, and you go on a date. You can see how the two fonts pair up. Incidentally, you'll learn about ascenders and descenders, serifs and strokes and curls. Mostly you'll just enjoy this website's interactivity and the creative way they make fonts the subject of a game. Check it out!

Not All Facts Are Equally Important

I am reading an excellent sci-fi novel, The January Dancer, by Michael Flynn. In describing Brigit Ban, one of his characters, Flynn says, “…she was the sort for whom a well- constructed narrative is worth a thousand detailed facts, and on occasion she was known to discard a fact or two to save the narrative.” Great description! Also, important advice for memoirists and family historians.

 

Whether telling your own story or that of your family you have a mass of facts at your disposal. Creating a book involves choosing which of those facts to include and which don’t make it into the book. Not all facts are equally important.

The objective of a family history or memoir is to trace what is most important in a person’s life. Your book should focus on dramatic moments, turning points, and illustrating the values of the person. So as you decide whether to tell the story chronologically or topically or to blend the two, ask yourself which of the facts and details you have gathered fit into the flow of the story you want to tell and which are digressions which will take your reader away from the main thrust of the story. Some digressions may be important in that they illustrate an important aspect of your subject’s character and therefore belong in the book. Others are outliers, true, but not really important to the flow of the story you want to tell. Your book may be better without them.

Your goal as a writer should be to create as vivid a picture of your character’s life as you can, not to list every bit of factual information you have accumulated through research and planning. Don’t be afraid to emulate Brigit Ban and, “…discard a fact or two to save the narrative.”

Don’t Pay the Ransom! We Escaped From Technology Hell.

Since you’re reading this, you know that the Stories To Tell website is back up. The site was down for parts of the last two days. We apologize if you couldn’t find us!

Courtesy of Mark Strozier under Creative Commons

We are in Cincinnati this week for the National Genealogical Society’s annual conference. We are having a great time meeting new family history enthusiasts and talking with them about books. We are encouraging them to go to our website to explore the variety of resources that will help them to get their family history books written and into print. We are happy to suggest that they use the new interactive downloadable questionnaire on our Publishing page titled Publisher? Printer? Just 10 Questions which will help people choose a printer for their books. We are excited because we are introducing the questionnaire at the Conference.

Then Thursday morning we check the website as we do each morning and the screen displays a Server Not Found message. Disaster! Nancy, who is our web master and resident geek, goes into crisis mode. Our site is constructed through Squarespace. Nancy emails and calls them. They are very courteous and supportive, but tell us that the site is fine on their end. Things are tracking to the web host, Dotster, perfectly.

In between conversations at our exhibit booth with people who want to create family history books, Nancy emails and calls Dotster. I Tweet the news that the site is down and we’re working on it.  In the meantime I recheck the site. It’s back up. Wow! Glad that bad moment is over! I Tweet that all is well. We relax.

We get back to our hotel after the conference, and because we’re paranoid recheck the site. Server Not Found! Arrgh! Nancy flies over the keyboard trying to figure things out. She calls Dotster again. The tech support guy who answers is kind of superior jerk we’ve all talked to. He says, “The problems is not Dotster’s, it’s yours. It’s really simple. Any competent person could figure it out.” It’s really fun to be insulted, belittled, and still not helped. Nancy went back to work online. She needed to get into pulldowns on Dotster that weren’t accessible to us. Finally, with no other alternative she called back to tech support.

Fortunately the night shift had come on. The new tech support guy was courteous and helpful. He listened and was willing to help Nancy get into the pulldowns, but said it wouldn’t do any good. Dotster was in the middle of some kind of big server upgrade and we were a victim. The engineering staff had installed new servers on Thursday and migrated all the customer sites to them. Unfortunately our site had not successfully migrated. Nancy asked when we could expect the problem to be fixed. The guy said the engineering staff had gone home for the night. Nancy said,” You mean they make this change, it doesn’t work, people's sites are down, and they just go home?” The guy said, “Yeah! Sorry, I’ll leave a note for them to check it in the morning.”

Fortunately they did manage to show up to get things working this morning.

The Dotster service agreement is coming up in June. We’ll be reviewing options.

Enough of a rant. Our next blog will go back to talking about books and other happier topics.

Why Does an Author Need an Editor?

Authors published by traditional publishers counted on and received quality editing before their manuscript went to press. A self publishing author must make sure that his book receives no less professional attention before publishing it.

Harriet Evans, author of the novel Love Always, said recently in a piece in The Guardian, “It is vital that an author has someone willing to be tough with them. It's in their best interests.”

Courtesy on Carlosn under Creative Commons

Why? One way to answer the question is to look at what one of the greatest contemporary editors, Robert Gottlieb, said about the author editor relationship Gottlieb X, discovered Joseph Heller and Catch 22, and edited Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, Salman Rushdie, Janet Malcolm, John Cheever, V.S. Naipaul, Nora Ephron and the historian Robert A. Caro, along with many, many more. He has also edited celebrities from Bill Clinton to Lauren Bacall, Sidney Poitier, John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Here’s what Gottlieb had to say about the editor’s role in a recent Salon Interview :

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a manuscript is perfect; you don’t have to do anything except say, “Great, well done!” and send it on its way. Sometimes, the problems are cosmetic, and you just have to be careful and point out where the language goes wrong and where there’s a contradiction or repetition — as I say, surface things. But sometimes the problems are structural, and the book just isn’t making sense as written. Then one has to sit with the writer and try to figure out how to make it cohere.

And then there are times when it’s just a matter of too much, and you have to convince the writer where it’s too much and why it’s too much — perhaps because there’s an imbalance. Often, it’s a question of the beginning and the end. Sometimes a book starts awkwardly. The writer hasn’t revved up and it’s stilted. You have to say, “You know, drop the first two paragraphs and you’re fine.”

How important can that kind of guidance be for a writer?

Evans asked, “Who knows whether Gone With the Wind would have been as successful had it been called, as it originally was, Pansy, after its eponymous heroine, Pansy O'Hara, before Margaret Mitchell's editor at Macmillan persuaded her to change the name to Scarlett?”

You - The Subject of Your Family History

There’s a branch of the family tree that a lot of family historians ignore – themselves.

People often express frustration about not being able to discover interesting stories as they research ancestors. They say, “I wish I’d asked ________to tell me more family stories before he/she died.” When future historians in your family look back, will they say that about your generation?

Courtesy of the Italian voice under Creative Commons

They won’t if you preserve your own personal history.

What generation are you more qualified to write about than your own? You are a primary source who can pass on first hand knowledge of what it was like to live through the last half of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st. No one knows the twists and turn of your life or can tell the story of those turning points better than you can?

If you are fortunate enough to have had an ancestor’s diary, journal or memoir to help you document your family’s history you’ll know the value of preserving your personal history.

What may be even more interesting is the insight it will provide the next generation into who you are. Most of us write family histories for the grandchildren. If you are one of those people, Oprah Winfrey offered some sound advice. She said, “I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.”

So, take some time out from researching distant ancestors to mine your own memory for the nuggets of an interesting and important addition to your family’s history – your own memoir.