About

At Wineskin Media, I craft books. A book isn't a mere “package”, it is quite literally a work of art. A fine book travels a long journey from the concept to the printer-ready file, and I offer years of experience for every step of the way.

• concept development
• writing
• editing
• layout
• graphic design
• printer-ready files
• marketing materials (copy, layout)

You can outsource one or more of these elements to me, or I can be your partner in the whole project. The choice is yours.

My interest in beautiful communication also includes web site design. Whether you want an online portfolio or a full-service shopping site, I can take you from registering your domain to a finished, lovely site.

You can read on to find out about Wineskin Media client areas, my services and rates, the software programs I use, and even a bit about me. You might also like to browse a more detailed resume or examine my online portfolio. Please contact me if you'd like to know more!

One special feature you'll appreciate as a Wineskin Media client is your own private client area on my web site. There's no extra charge; it's simply an efficient way for us to keep current on our projects together.

Each project has a page that we can both edit. A project page usually includes:

• The current calendar for the project.
• A record of which steps we've already accomplished.
• “To Do” items for both of us.
• Links to past and current drafts, usually in PDF format.
• Anything else you like; it's easy to add custom sections.

We use a simple wiki syntax; it's like HTML markup, but a bit easier.

Since we can both edit the page, we have a common page that always has all the current information on the project in one place. No more hunting through emails to try to find the most recent project calendar.

You can click Subscribe Changes and receive an email notice whenever either of us edits this page. If you add a new “To Do” item for me, I'll immediately get an email. You don't have to contact me directly, and the record is there for either of us to access whenever we like. Then, when I finish the task and note that on the page, you'll hear about it right away.

(Note that you can always check the “Minor Changes” box to skip the email notification for a particular round of edits.)

You can also upload files. When editing a page, look at the row of buttons above the editing box, and click the picture frame. You'll be able to upload your file, then make a link for it, such as {{new-cover-image.jpg}}.

Since I link each complete project draft to its project page, you can access any version of the project at any time. For a small additional fee, I can also upload a “nightly build” of the project each evening so you always see the exact status.

You can see a sample project page here. If you'd like to try editing a page, contact me for a free guest username and password.

Of course, you're always free to contact me directly through email whenever you like, whether to send files or just make a note. I'll still keep our project pages updated, so you can see the current status of each project at a glance.

These prices can only be estimates, as every project is a little bit different. You can contact me at any time for a free estimate on your specific need. I'm flexible; we can work with a bid or my hourly rate of $40, whichever you prefer.

Based on the final count of typeset pages (average size and font):

• 200 typeset pages
• a few pictures
• 30 footnotes or less
• and 1 round of basic revisions on up to 75 pages.
• $64 per additional 50 typeset pages.
• $32 per additional 100 footnotes

An intensely graphical layout, such as a coffee table book, is a pleasure, but requires a specific estimate.

Revisions. Extensive or additional rounds of revisions are best dealt with on an hourly or case-by-case basis, depending on the complexity involved. A good median is one hour per 25 pages with basic revisions (around 3 or 4 edits per page).

Footnotes. Footnotes in LaTeX are automatically proofread: in order to typeset them, I need to build a bibliographic database. This database is used to number them, keep them consistent, generate a bibliography (if desired), and track whether each citation is the first and should be given in full. These features were essential with the recent Dawson biography, which had over 1100 footnotes.

per 50,000 words (about 200 manuscript pages):

The two prices for indexing reflect the time I save if I've already read the manuscript for another purpose before I begin the index. Otherwise, I still have to read the manuscript.

A standard manuscript page has 250 words. Since a typeset page may contain more words, the “simple book” package might consist of 200 typeset pages, but more manuscript pages. A manuscript of greater or lesser than 200 manuscript pages is prorated in increments of 20 pages.

Time frame. If I'm only typesetting, I can have a “simple book” PDF back to you in 2 weeks. Proofreading or other editorial work may require additional time, depending on the manuscript.

A standard book cover is $900. This includes concept, design, the works: I can come up with the whole thing from scratch if you like. If you want a particular image or font, you may have to acquire that separately, but I have access to thousands of excellent royalty-free images and fonts.

It used to be that any time you needed the slightest change on your web site, you had to ring up the designer. Today, online software allows you to add and edit posts or manage your inventory with ease, even if you don't know any HTML. I can work with you to design and set up your site, then show you how you'll be able to use the software to manage your content for years to come.

Your online presence, with a personalized design for your company. Once you're set up with Joomla!, you'll be able manage your content on your own in the future.

I install, tweak, and test your new cart, to your specifications. Once you're up and running with ZenCart, you'll be able to manage your inventory and orders with ease.

Sometimes, of course, you don't want a new site, you simply want to improve what you already have. I can also provide additional services, including design, writing, editing, and, depending on your host, installation of various free software such as forums, mailing list managers, and more. Depending on the circumstances, I can also migrate content from your old site.

Experience has taught me that every web site is very different. Some people prefer that I stay on the project until every last detail is just right. Others may be on a strict budget; they want me there for the heavy lifting, but they'll take the time to learn the software and do the tweaks on their own.

Either approach is fine with me. We'll talk it all out beforehand, so you won't have any surprises.

I help you get your site the way you want it. But there are a few other costs of having a web site.

• My estimates do not include the cost of web hosting or domain registration. Unless you're running your own server, you'll need to rent space with a “host”, usually on a yearly basis. You'll have to register your domain name as well, so everyone on the Internet knows where to find you.

If you're in the market for a host, I recommend WestHost (and no, it's not because I get a referral bonus). I've hosted my own sites on WestHost for years, and I especially appreciate their free support of several key applications such as MySQL, osCommerce, and PHP. I can help you get set up; hosting sites can be a bit bewildering, and you may appreciate advice on which package will work best for you.

• Another possible expense is upgrading your software every few months. The software is free, but it does cost developer time to install upgrades. I'm happy to do this for you. Or, depending on your host, you may be able to do this yourself with a few clicks.

• For a shopping cart, another ongoing expense will be a merchant to process credit card orders. Options include PayPal and Authorize.net.

With many hosts (including WestHost), you can actually install this software yourself with a few clicks. At no extra charge. So where do I come in?

* Affordable design. A default install looks “default.” I can get the site looking the way you want. This is harder than it looks … and I'm not even sure it looks easy.

* Customization. A default install also acts “default.” You'll almost certainly want to change this default behavior. It can be a long journey with hundreds of details from a default install to a functioning, unique site that looks, acts, and says what you want. I can take you there, because:

* I've already scaled the learning curve. Most software is designed to make a few central, repetitive tasks easy. It's easy to edit articles, add products, make sales. This is very good. It means you don't have to call the web designer every time you sell a new product.

But for everything else, especially for customization, you can either spend a great deal of time learning, or find someone who already has.

Web sites are a strange beast. In a browser, a site looks like a single page that just ran off a printer. But under the hood, a page is often made of many little pieces, getting spat out by different chunks of code. You find this out when you go to make changes. Sometimes you need to use the web interface. Sometimes you need to edit the right text file(s). Sometimes you practically need to know the underlying programming language. And until you know the software, there's no way to tell, just by looking at the site, where to go to change something.

Good thing I know the software.

If you're starting a new company, or taking a new direction, perhaps you'd like me to design your logo.

I have thousands of fonts, and I can help you find just the look you want.

InDesign. Quark. Ventura. When you think “desktop publishing”, these well-known applications may be the first items that leap to mind. If you need something typeset, you're looking for a professional who invests in the tools of the trade. But some of the lesser known tools out there are also some of the best.

They're also free. If you're unfamiliar with the free and open source software community, the idea may shock you: how could a free program be anything more than a toy? Yet you probably rely on free software every day. For instance, there's a good chance your company web site runs on Apache, an open source server that runs half the Internet. Free and open source software is a critical tool for many major organizations (for example, NASA).

The word free here has two meanings: free as in speech, and free as in beer. For my work, it's the freedom of speech that's essential. If software is free, it means that if something goes wrong or I need a particular improvement, I can look right at the code and fix it myself. Each famous program I mentioned earlier is proprietary; it's actually illegal for you to examine the code you paid for, much less make any changes. You don't own these programs; the typical End User License Agreement amounts to a rental.

Now if you're not a programmer, you don't want to touch the code anyway, but the key is that anyone else can look at the code too. If there's a problem or a needed feature, any programmer anywhere on the face of the planet can fix it right now; and they often do.

While not all free software is also free as in beer, most of it is, for an excellent reason which the above quote makes clear: dissemination. The more people who can use, critique, and improve an application, the better it will be. While developers of such projects are often highly-paid professionals, the economics of free software are simple: at a minimum, everyone gets paid in better code. The two senses of free work together.

Free software is a crucial benefit I have to offer. Rather than attempt to support every version of every proprietary application in use, excellent as it may be, I simply use software which any client can always download for free. With the exception of LaTeX, which is a highly specialized typesetting tool, every program I use installs easily on almost any platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.), and features a familiar, easy-to-use interface. (LaTeX is also free, of course, but the learning curve is commensurate with its power.) Ideally, I could guarantee support of any program you might care to use; in the real world, the next best thing is to guarantee that you can get any program I use, any time you like, for free.

My typesetting program of choice is LaTeX, which is based on TeX. TeX is a mature typesetting language; people have been crafting scholarly books and journals with TeX for decades. It's a whole different kind of program than, say, Pagemaker. Rather than a WYSIWYG interface, where you draw frames on the page and fill them with text, TeX is a “language”, like HTML. LaTeX is a set of additional macros, written in TeX, that make it easier to separate form from content and add new styles and capabilities.

Usually, I'll receive a manuscript from a client as a document created by a word processor, such as OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Word. I'll convert this document to several LaTeX source files, which are basically the text of the work plus markup. For instance, this is how you \emph{emphasize} a word. These files are plain text; when you open one, you see the exact characters that are stored on your hard drive. You can view them in any text editor, on any platform. Twenty years from now, you'll be able to open these files in any text editor, on any platform. They will never refuse to open because they're “corrupt.”

Have you ever tried to open a Pagemaker file from the 90s? Or received a document that was saved in the next version of Word, the one you haven't upgraded to yet?

Of course, a LaTeX source document isn't the actual printer-ready book. My major service as a typesetter is to use and design the additional packages (also plain text) which will make the book lovely, as well as indexed, appendixed, and so on.

It's true that to transform all this into a printer-ready PDF, you need a functioning LaTeX setup and any necessary additional packages. The bad news is that unlike all the other free programs I use, LaTeX can be difficult to get up and running. The good news is that not only is LaTeX free and stable, it has an immense user base which is willing to help. Besides, you don't even need to bother with the LaTeX files unless you want to; you'll receive a printer-ready PDF. If you ever need to revise the files, you can come to me, or download LaTeX yourself, or get help another typesetter who uses LaTeX. Your options are the same as with the output from any professional software, with the additional benefit that if you opt to acquire the software yourself, it's free and stable.

When the source file is ready, I run it through LaTeX, which outputs a printer-ready PDF. For revisions, I edit the source file and output a fresh PDF. Although it does take a few seconds to generate the new PDF, I save those seconds many times over again by being able to work on the files in a quality text editor, as I explain below.

For Distributist Perspectives II, IHS Press wanted to be able to edit the source files themselves, but not to learn LaTeX, so I used OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a WYSIWYG word processor, available for free, naturally. OpenOffice can output to a printer-ready PDF. Normally I would not use a word processor for typesetting, but OpenOffice is frame based and has decent hyphenation algorithms, and the book was simple, so the result was good. If you've used Microsoft Word, you can use OpenOffice; but again, LaTeX is my tool of choice.

For book covers, I use Scribus. Scribus is a WYSIWYG DTP program that's probably similar to what you're familiar with: Quark, Pagemaker, and so on. As with my other tools, you can download it for free, and the output is PDF. All my book covers featured on this site were made with Scribus.

A good book cover generally needs an excellent photo or two, so I use the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you've ever used Adobe Photoshop, you'll be right at home. And if you haven't yet invested in Photoshop, or the latest upgrade, give the GIMP a try; with layers, filters, and much more, you may wonder why more people haven't heard about this marvelous program.

A book is mostly text.

I used WYSIWYG programs for years, and I see their good points; I'm grateful I have them now for book covers and other graphics-heavy projects. But if I'm trying to manipulate a few hundred pages, I'm far happier whizzing through a collection of text files than clicking and clicking through a sluggish GUI. I used Pagemaker for years, and LaTeX certainly feels faster.

This would still be true even if I ran a WYSIWYG on a supercomputer. A book is essentially tens of thousands of words. I want to be able to edit those words, fast. This need is all the greater on projects where I'm not only typesetting but proofreading and editing as well. I've never used a WYSIWYG program, not even Microsoft Word, that had text manipulation tools that even came close to a solid text editor. I use Vim.

LaTeX offers intricate control over the layout of a manuscript. I can code changes in one place in a LaTeX file that might require changes to multiple master pages in Pagemaker. Of course, any decent DTP programs includes a scripting language, but my impression is that you're expected to use that as an arcane last resort. LaTeX allows you to separate content almost completely from appearance. Aspects that in a WYSIWYG have to be edited all over the place (master pages, style dialog boxes, etc.) can all be coded at the beginning of the LaTeX file, and saved as a separate style or classfile to use for later projects.

For instance, having designed the layout for an upcoming issue of Faith and Reason, the academic journal for Christendom College, my work on future issues will be almost entirely editorial, unless they want to change the look. I convert their Word documents to LaTeX, use my old style file, and there's the PDF.

So far, this might sound like templates in other DTP software, but LaTeX provides a much more fine-grained control. This journal's a good example. As I convert each article into LaTeX, I use a special macro around the name of the article's author. With this label, which I defined for this project, the name is not only typeset correctly, as an applied style might do, but the last name is placed in the article header, in uppercase, and the full name is placed in the Table of Contents. All with the same macro.

LaTeX makes beautiful books. Period.

It's not that you can't make beautiful books with other programs; people do all the time. But there's a mysterious quality about LaTeX, a certain something, which is really the convergence of all the tiny details it gets right. If you check my portfolio, you'll see what I mean.

The one obvious advantage of a WYSIWYG interface is immediate feedback. That I grant. I do have to hit a few keystrokes and wait a few seconds to to examine my work in a refreshed PDF. But as I said earlier, I save those seconds many times over in a day. And I constantly have my eye on the PDF, the final output, rather than hoping that when I'm done in my program, the PDF will turn out right. The final PDF is the only guaranteed “what you you see is what you get.”

So I use LaTeX for text-heavy projects because it offers more control, is more enjoyable, allows me to spend my time in a good text editor, and is almost certainly faster, especially when multiple projects will have the same look and structure.

At the end of the day, LaTeX simply feels better. I know from hard-won experience that I can get it to do pretty much anything I want. I may have to dig deep into unholy and arcane syntax, I may have to hunt for secrets not meant for mere mortals, but I'm never going to hit a brick wall. There's always some way to customize and extend it, and that's exactly what I need.

I've loved books for as long as I can remember, and every once in awhile I'm suddenly amazed that I know how to make them. This isn't just work, it's a craft; I want every project to turn out beautiful. Since I'm also a writer, I know how much craft goes into a manuscript, and yet, as an editor and typesetter, that word processor document is like a hunk of marble, awaiting the release of the statue. I love the first magical rebirth of double-spaced Times New Roman into typeset Palatino or Charter, and I love hunkering down to hunt and smooth all the rough edges in the work. I love the wonder of a good cover, the surprised appreciation of a client that it looks real, that they really have a real book. And I love holding that real book.

I started my own business for many reasons, but one of the most important was so I could be selective in the books and media I help bring into the world. In the age of information overload, I don't want to add to the noise.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how I much I respect and aspire to craft, to doing things well. Or perhaps “well” doesn't even capture it. Chesterton said that if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly, but he seems to have meant the opposite of “shoddily”. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing with all your strength; even if the end result isn't top-notch, you certainly wish it was, and you'll try again next time. So many things I see are just shoddy: books, buildings, towns, economies, you name it. I can't claim to be crafting my own life perfectly, much less possess perfect designs for all the world, but I'm fascinated by true craft wherever I see it.

That's why my wife and I (and our baby daughter) spent a growing season as interns on a small organic farm in rural Maryland. Having spent an entire life acquiring a formal education, and then worked with a small press making educational books, I realized that despite all this knowledge and despite having eaten thousands of meals, I had very little idea how to grow food. Perhaps I'm attracted to the invisible arts; like typesetting, the craft of food is most successful when least noticed.

I continue to admire and study the arts by which we acquire the essentials of life: food, water, heat, shelter, community, and so on. I'm particularly interested in permaculture, which is a whole science of designing systems that combine a myriad of functions, inputs, and outputs into a great dance, all with the least human effort possible. A permaculturist might slowly reclaim a desert by digging swales and planting them with carefully chosen hardy species. Instead of having to lay expensive irrigation lines that need to be maintained, the swales simply sit there and collect the little rain that does fall. Since the rain is gathered, rather than running off, it can support those particular plants, which in turn create a shadowed, cooler microsystem for other plants to grow.

Or a permaculturist might take a supposedly “tiny” space, like a suburban backyard, and plant it with just the right combination of fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables as to feed and delight an entire family.

Then there's the design of houses, neighborhoods, cities. I can read Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language for hours, and I'm excited about new movements in city planning such as Traditional Neighborhood Design. Poorly designed economies play havoc with everyone; I'm a confirmed distributist, which essentially means that neither big socialist governments nor big corporations ought to be allowed to smother independent businesses and the families who run them.

Between typesetting, editing, writing, reading, and tinkering with Linux, as well as my efforts to learn basic gardening, animal husbandry, and construction skills, all of which somehow seem to count as “work”, I'm hard pressed to round this out with any actual hobbies. I have a knack for blurring the distinction. I relish pen-and-paper roleplaying games, but if I just call them “collaborative storytelling,” as indeed they are, they sound like a respectable variation on the writer's group. I do like playing the piano, trying to play the guitar, playing with my kids, and being in plays, all of which firmly qualify as non-income-producing activities.

You can find out much more about me than anyone really needs to know at my personal web site, Bill Powell is Alive. There's also my resume and portfolio, and again, I invite you to contact me whenever you like. Thanks so much for reading. I hope to read something of yours, and soon.