[NOTE: Today the blog features a detailed first-hand account by my friend Jay MacLean, a 9-to-5 writer working in the Philippines, about his decision to gather and publish his accumulated personal writings and memories. I was most impressed with his declaration to me of how liberating and mind-clearing the experience has been.]

My self-publishing experience began in mid 2006, when I was looking out our condo window in Manila and marveling how fast the skyline has been changing, almost unrecognizable within the 11-year lifespan (to date) of our son. I recalled how my childhood in Sydney, Australia, was the complete opposite — nothing changed, and viewed from Google earth, still hasn’t. I thought I should write down some of the childhood differences and was soon deep into my own early years and youth. I began to write it all down. The chapters flowed easily if not excitingly. After all, I know more about me (and my son) than most other things. I then viewed the project as a legacy, something for my immediate family and oth er relatives. Most of them are in Australia, so there was the added dimension of space — I could let them know about life in the Philippines as well.

At some point, I realized that I was beginning something big. Behind me I had dozens of short pieces that I wrote as letters to a friend in Australia over a 20-year period, about backpack travel in the Philippines as well as business trips to Europe and the Americas. There were also dozens of diving articles, quite a few of which were published in diving magazines in Australia, Philippines and Thailand. For years I was wondering what to do with them. The solution was to link them chronologically in an expanded autobiography.

My sister in Sydney meanwhile, has been digitizing family photos dating back to the 1900s. This was a great resource from which to extract memories, dates and forgotten facts.

Finally, I had a stack of correspondence under various categories totalling nearly a foot thick — from the times when people wrote “hard-copy” letters to each other.

So going forward and backward from my birth year, there was plenty of material around in photos, memories, short stories, and published articles.

Everything was done in Word. So I decided to stay with that program when it came to publishing. The 6″ x 9″ paperback book format was used. I experimented with Page Layout until I had a pleasing (to me) look regarding margin width etc. I chose Century Schoolbook as the font because we used it often in professional book publications in the research organization I spent 17 years with as information director.

I used few photos in my own project, about 1 in 4 pages overall to keep the file size down. The photos began at around 0.5 to 1.0 megabytes but with iGoogle’s Picasa you can play with them (crop, make black and white) and export them to much smaller sizes (50 kb is enough for a photo in the corner of a 6″ x 9″ book format). Once the pictures are in the text Word helps you add captions. However, when you have several photos in a chapter, altering the length of the text or size of a photo causes unpredictable moves of other photos and captions. You need patience to reposition them one by one.

In Manila, Central Book’s print-on-demand publishing facility seemed to be the only choice for what I wanted — to print 30 copies of the book(s )in a very professional manner. A tour of the 2007 book fair confirmed this choice. Their process was to take the Word file and lay it out as a .pdf document for digital printing. They make a cover design from scratch or using your photos and ideas. Authors get three draft copies to check, edit, etc. I didn’t like their layout, which was too generous and made to heighten the vanity press angle. No fault of theirs, I guess. But from the first draft they sent I worked out the required dimensions of the Word text (margins, header, footer and gutter sizes) and made my own pdf file. Once you have a pdf, you are in control.

I had no idea of the final size of my project as it gradually came together from new writing and old stories, linked by other memories and events. But I thought I had maybe 4 book-fulls of short stories.

The last job was to cut up the compiled chapters into separate books. The first one, dealing mainly with my youth, ended with my leaving home at page 213. In the end I divided the text into 9 books, five of which were of similar length to the first; the other four were 360-380 pages.

I checked out Central Books paper and cover material and quality. Pretty good. Their minimum advertised quantity was 50 copies, but we live in a small condominium! For a small increase per copy, I had them do the 30 copies very satisfactorally. After my initial visit to the press, everything was done by email. Payment was to their courier who delivered the goods.

The result: a set of paperbacks that have unloaded my mind of old dragons and worries that I had nothing written in an convenient manner to tell my scattered family about, and found interested readers in the family and beyond – -one volume was a stand alone about our 20-years of weekend living and diving at Anilao, Philippines. I will copyright them and think about promoting them through Google book search. I feel obliged to share some of the contents on the web for their historical “value”. The site has no books yet but they will be on http://macleanstory.googlepages.com.

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