So bad it's good.

Also books are not the same size, at least in France there is no standard sizes for books, there's no standard paperbook or hardcover sizes. The sizing and dimensions of a book depends on the publisher, the collection, and what the printer is able to make

It’s actually kind of a thing: you can spot indie self publishers because they do have a specific size they’ve been pushed into by the industry because those are the places that give us access to the global market.

(It used to be you could also tell who was self pub based on paper quality, because self-pub authors tend to opt for nicer paper quality to look more professional, while trad-pub goes for thinner, less white paper.)

Indie trade paperback are usually uniform sizes, as are hardback. The only major variable is usually the spine width due to page count, paper weight, etc

Which is taken into account by the printer when they generate a template for you to fit your cover design into. This step is usually automated by a computer.

So they generate the template based on whether you’re doing paperback, hardback and what your page count, paper weight, etc is. You make your cover wrap fit the template. You follow their guidelines exactly.

And then, very nearly every time the thing that scans your upload will tell you it’s wrong. Where is it wrong? Couldn’t tell you, chief. It’s just wrong.

Okay, so you try again, once again using the template they generated for you. If you’re me you’ll have emailed customer service by this point to ensure the automated template is correct. It is. The computer didn’t make an error. You did. Where’s the error? Guess :)

If you’re lucky it’ll work the second time. What did you do differently? No idea. You just fiddle-fucked with it slightly and now it works despite following the exact same outline as before.

And then you have to do this across multiple platforms for mass distribution because everyone has different printers that require different things. Sometimes 3-4 times depending on which markets you’re trying to reach.

And then some of the front cover will still wrap around onto the spine or be printed crooked. So then when you do reprints you alter your cover design to stop that happening.

I'm doing a spring cleaning in my online shop, and almost everything has a discounted price! ✨🌸🧹

🌸 annikcomics.bigcartel.com 🌸

✨shiny✨anime✨prints!✨

Fanart of Witch Hat Atelier, Delicious in Dungeon, Mononoke and Dandadan, on a shiny pearl paper ✨👌

You can find them in my shop: https://annikcomics.bigcartel.com/products

They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.

But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.

I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.

D2D has implemented it to try and combat the fact that their free access model means they've been getting hammered by AI slop uploads. (Barnes and Noble are also getting hammered, and they've chosen instead to restrict author accounts to 100 books per account.) They're hoping having a small fee will discourage those people.

The $12 yearly maintenance fee through D2D is still substantially lower than what Ingram charges to distribute through them every time you make an upload (the last time I looked it worked out at $75 per physical book + $25 every time you wanted to make a change to the files) but it's still enough of a barrier that some authors who don't make the $100+ a year threshold are looking for a different platform.

So I knew I wanted to self-indulgently print copies of my fanfic, "The Town Theatre Presents: Orpheus and Eurydice," pretty much as soon as I finished it. I managed to put it off until this winter, when I wanted to have them ready to go in January. One thing happened after another and I have ended up stitching and binding these babies all by myself but with this pretty letterpress covers by local artist arquoise press who helped me out a lot and. Well. Just look at these!

Anyway, if you would like a copy I could use the help making back the money I spent on all these print costs and these beautiful covers. The first few orders come with a limited bonus bookmark, also made by arqoise press (thank you!). Also this is a living story and couldn't just go to print as it was. The print copy is a slightly different beast.

Thank you also to Harpy, who I know is on tumblr but I forget your username I'm sorry, for helping with the layout and all the bookbinding advice.

I am selling the book at cost, with no profit margin. If the shipping seems a little steep, it's because I've been burned by not charging enough before. I will refund any overcharges that I might make once it's in the mail. Thanks for your patience. I'm currently working on binding as many as I can at a time and the first batch should ship in May.

Can I interest you in some Queer Comics?

"My sister has had an expensive gaming machine and didn't use it and doesn't use it now but might do some light gaming stuff at an indeterminate point in the future and is currently using my personal laptop to do basic web browsing, I'm trying to ensure that my sister can keep doing web browsing but whenever I ask my friends for advice they start at a high price point and the people I know who have purchased used equipment have bad experiences with it that I'm not interested in duplicating; is it possible to get an inexpensive computer that will accomplish what I'm looking for here without it turning into a time suck because I'm not particularly good at computers?" is not what someone says when they want you to start speccing out a machine that requires a graphics card that costs as much as the machine that they actually need. The question was not "can you find me a less expensive gaming machine?" it was "is there such a thing as an affordable non-garbage machine my sister can use to look at Ao3 or are my choices 'used office machine old enough to have a driver's license,' 'cheap-but-trash machine that will have to be replaced annually,' or 'gaming rig that costs as much as a car'?"

I get where you're coming from here, almost everybody CAN become technical if they want to, but most people who are not CURRENTLY technical can't generally become technical in the timeframe that they would need to in order to manage whatever problem they're having.

So I search for information about how to do checksum bullshit in Windows and the instructions I come to from the Ubuntu site say "If you aren't using linux on windows, why on earth not? You should do this by installing linux."

THAT IS THE THING THAT I AM TRYING TO DO I NEED AN INSTRUCTION FOR HOW TO DO A STEP IN THE OS THAT I AM CURRENTLY USING SO THAT I CAN INSTALL LINUX.

Seriously, follow some links with me. From the link above to this:

From that to releases:

From the release download you can get info on how to burn the images to disk:

Which tells you that you need to verify the image:

and then links you for info on how to do that in Linux!!!!!

THIS CHASES NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE AWAY. THIS IS WHY NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE THINK LINUX IS SCARY. BECAUSE WE GO 'OH NO YOU HAVE TO VERIFY YOUR DOWNLOAD IT'S A VITAL SECURITY STEP' and then the non-technical people go "Okay how do I do that" and the instructions say "Why aren't you already using linux, dipshit?"

Because that is, legitimately, where a lot of people get lost.

*I* knew how to find other documentation without relying on ONLY links from the foundation I got the install from, non-technical people *don't* know how to do that and a lack of clear instructions paired with a tremendously unwelcoming user base makes beginners stumble.

Ubuntu is not the only tech documentation I'm familiar with (and is certainly not the only linux documentation that is confusing, circular, and poorly formatted), and there are a ton of tech literate people who recommend various ubuntu distros for a number of reasons.

My job is talking to non-technical people about their tech stacks so that the decision-makers don't have to be exposed to techs and the whole reason that my job is necessary is because "git gud" is an unfortunately common communication strategy in tech spaces.

My hobby is infosec and this attitude of "you're stupid for using this program and stupider for missing the obvious instruction to open a terminal window and install via command line" is genuinely a massive security problem because it convinces normies that any attempt to "do tech stuff" is futile so they don't bother.

We are trying to verify the integrity of an ISO file

We do that by verifying the checksum for the ISO file

OP's Screenshots, in order, show:

The frustrating and condescending message the she received when she tried to look up further instructions for this step in the Ubuntu documentation pages. This links you to:

What seems to be the beginning of the Ubuntu install guide??? From which you can choose your specific use case, i.e. WSL, which then links you to:

The place where it tells you to run the command in question - which seems to be a page where it is telling you to install Ubuntu, NOT a page telling you how to verify the checksums on individual software packets you might have downloaded in order to do so? Which... if you're non-tech-y, and you're worried about possibly bricking your one and only computer because you ran an unverified program that might be a virus or broken somehow (damaged/missing packets - not that you, a non-tech-savvy person, would know that) you are probably ready to give up by this point? Also, if you have the individual install files and not the singular Ubuntu file referenced in that command line, that command would fail anyway, would it not???

A screenshot that indicates a list of places to download the ISO files in question [cut off, but presumably listed below] and links you to a how-to for burning the images to a disk

A screenshot that tells you that you need to verify the ISO integrity, and then apparently (per OP) links you to how to do that in Ubuntu... the thing that you don't have installed...

Like. Okay. Is there a world in which downloading that specific file packet (Ubuntu 24.04) and running that specific command (wsl --install Ubuntu-24.04) bypasses the need for all of this, because it simply installs Ubuntu, this verifying checksums as part of the process? I mean, sure, maybe. But at no point in any of those screenshots does it say anything like "running 'wsl --install -Unbuntu 24.04' will verify checksums as part of the process"; so to me, it in fact does NOT say that in the screenshots. At best that's something that you read into the instructions with outside knowledge that you have, that the non-tech set that this stream was directed at do not have. That's absolutely going to scare them off!

And also, what else does that do? Does it, for instance, uninstall or otherwise render unusable the Windows OS that OP seems to be trying to leave intact, for non-techy users who are just trying to get their feet wet with Linux? Because if so, that's a perfect deliberation of why non-tech people hate tech people, and also why OP has the job that she does.

Also, there's two methods for installing Ubuntu shown in that screenshot. It's late, and I'm sick again, and very tired, but in my experience, often - not always, but often - when there's two methods to do something, there's a possibility that one of the methods accomplishes something different than the other method; you can't simply mix and match unless you understand both pretty in depth. If you are a non-tech person trying to follow these directions, you are barely following the tech jargon in these screenshots. The last thing you want to do is guess and be wrong and fuck up your entire computer. You are not going to knowingly follow instructions from Method A when you are supposed to be following Method B unless you are an idiot, because then when you take your computer to Geek nephew or Geek Squad, they're going to look at you and be like "well why didn't you just follow the instructions?" And I know this, because I've had to rewrite tech instructions on the fly for people in my real life at my real job because the engineers just assumed that Everybody Knew Stuff that Everybody Did Not Know.

I do consider myself a tech person and let me tell you something: You are 100% percent CORRECT.

The problem with a lot of this is a lack of communication. Like, you want Linux to be used by the everyday person? Don't tell them RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual)! You need to WTFM (WRITE THE FUCKING MANUAL) so people can actually read it.

This is the reason global warming got the bullshit rep that it did: The people explaining it did not know how to actually communicate it. It took DECADES to even get what little traction we have and it's still "Golly! Look at all this snow! Sure don't look like GlObAl WaRmInG to me!"

I can see where the screenshot says to run wsl --install, but what it does not say, which I can tell you the nontechnical person is going to have as the first question when they see that is:

"WHERE do I run wsl --install...?"

They aren't going to intuit that you need to open command prompt and run as admin then type 'wsl --install...'. (The .exe file is much more likely to be how a non-technical person would try to install it except that nontechnical people have been warned a million times not to click on .exe files if they don't know exactly what they do)

For example, I do in house tech support at my workplace. While a few of my coworkers might be able to follow along the conversation above, a good % of them can not reliably locate the downloads folder on their computer.

I’m not saying this to shit on my coworkers. They’re all smart people and highly competent in their own field. But very few of them can confidently to install a printer, let alone an operating system. They might use computers, but they don’t really know how anything works.

THE WITCH DOOR FRIDAY UPDATE!

Chapter 16 page 20 New reader? Start here!

Since I no longer work on this project, I feel like I can finally share what I have been working on for past 6-5 years.

I was a game and character artist on RuPaul's Drag Race Superstar and I was in charge of the queen character (aside from RuPaul and Trixie is also little complicated) and I was also doing the clothes and makeup for the game.

Here are some of my favourites!

THE WITCH DOOR WEDNESDAY UPDATE!

tästä kannattaa siis entistä enemmän pitää meteliä, Zuckerberg voi haistaa paskat

1 week left to order my physical comic zines from my online shop (for now)!✨ I draw a little doodle in each of them 😊

Shipping is available to limites countries, please read the info page carefully! 🙏💜

https://annikcomics.itch.io/