Control your creative destiny with a hands-on publishing workshop ...

• Tom Johnson -- a digital trailblazer -- leads this weekend workshop highlighting basic computer programs and techniques readily available to help you publish your  novel, memoir, poetry, dissertation, cookbook. Photo collections, enhanced with your text, can be published, as well.
• Learn how to use the computer applications you already have to prepare and publish your manuscripts.
• Learn how free, on-line web applications can guide you though the formatting of your work so it will look good in print.
• Learn how those formatted pages, created with easily available word processing templates and including graphics, can be saved and uploaded to web-based, print-on-demand companies.
• Those pages become chapters that easily become hardcover or paperback books -- or an e-book -- available directly from your author-publisher's page and also listed on Amazon. You set the prices and the author's royalty, which is considerably more than traditional publishing house royalties.
• You will leave the workshop with rich introduction to the vocabulary and tools of Print-on-Demand publishing, a familiarity with using those tools, a detailed checklist of the self-publishing process and direct references to software and vendors to take your publishing skills to the next level.
• Lagniappe:  Learn how to project the statistical probability that your title will be a best-seller on The New York Times list. (Well, no guarantees, but it's fun.)
  

Not for rank beginners: This is a fast-moving workshop, covering a semester's worth of instruction in a day or day-and-a-half, so we must request a certain level of computing skills.  We assume you are comfortable connecting to a wireless network, with using a word process program and knowing how to set margins, select fonts, have used headers and footers, inserted and formatted page numbers and, ideally, have inserted some graphic images into your document.   You should know something about downloading and installing computer programs from the internet and be familiar with uploading and downloading files.  Finally, we hope you know how to save a file in different formats, especially PDF.  

• A 3-4 page example of a manuscript that includes
• A chapter title
• One or two sub-headings within the chapter
• One or two images inserted in the text
• If you can bring a laptop with WiFi capability, that's great.  If not, don't worry because we often will be asking you to work in two-person teams anyway.

Forthcoming:

• California in August 2010: Register now for the day-and-a-half "Be Your Own Publisher" workshop in the California Gold Country
• Saturday, August 28-Sunday, August 29, 2010
• Workshop will be in either Jackson or Mokelumne Hill, California
• $135 tuition for registration before Aug. 1 including continental breakfast and lunch; $175 tuition after Aug. 1
• Limited to 15 participants -- Register now so you won't be disappointed
• Jackson, California
• Click to attend this event and register for workshop
• Click here to reserve hotel accommodation
  
  

Past Presentations and Events

• Gold Rush Writers Conference
  May 1-3, 2009 - Mokelumne Hill, California
  Laptop 2: "Lulu, where are you? Print-on-Demand Publishing" (PowerPoint slides for a one-hour intro to P-o-D)
  
• Free Introductory Presentation - 7 p.m., Tuesday, July 28 - Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Santa Fe Complex
• "Be Your Own Publisher" day-long seminar with Tom Johnson and Anita Quintana - Sat., Aug. 22 - St. John's United Methodist Church,
  1200 Old Pecos Trail @ Cordova Road,  Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Click here for map.  
  
  
• "Be Your Own Publisher" workshop in the California Gold Country -  Sept. 25-27, 2009 - Hotel Leger, Mokelumne Hill, California
• California in 2010: Register now for the "Be Your Own Publisher" workshop in the California Gold Country
• Friday, April 30, 2010 - Day-long workshop preceding the Gold Rush Writers' Conference (May 1-3)
• $100 tuition including continental breakfast and lunch
• Wisconsin:  Manitowa Girl Scout Offices., Sheboygan, Wisconsin May 8, 2010

Workshop Contacts:

Presenter Tom Johnson's 35-year career in journalism has taken him from the classroom to the newsroom and back. He began using computers to tease meaning out of data while a Ph.D. candidate in the early '70s and studying the impact of technology on urban spaces. By the early '80s he was writing about dedicated word processing systems (think $13,000 in 1978 dollars) and covering the early stages of personal computing in Silicon Valley for TIME and Popular Science.   He worked for Time Magazine in El Salvador in the mid-'80s, was the start-up editor of MacWeek, and a deputy editor of the  St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His areas of interest are analytic journalism, dynamic simulation models of publishing systems,   complexity theory, the application of Geographic Information Systems in journalism and the impact of the digital revolution  on journalism and journalism education. He is the founder and co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Website: www.jtjohnson.com     E-mail: tom@jtjohnson.com

Workshop coordinator Antoinette May's second novel, The Sacred Well, published by HarperCollins in April 2009 is already garnering critical acclaim. Antoinette turned to fiction with Pilate's Wife, a tale of the Roman Empire.  The novel, published in November 2006 by William Morrow, has been translated into 18 languages.Antoinette's non-fiction includes the New York Times best seller, Adventures of a Psychic, a biography of psychic Sylvia Browne. Antoinette was the 1997 recipient of La Pluma de Plata, an award conferred by the Mexican Government for the best travel article on their country. Website: www.antoinettemay.com     E-mail: toni@antoinettemay.com