Anyway, back to self publishing. Some self-publishers prefer to call themselves "independent writer/publishers" to emphasize that they've not been caught out by the vanity press.
What happens if you get hooked by a subsidy publishing service? The chances are that you'll spend thousands of pounds (or dollars or euros or whatever) and find yourself with a shed load of books you can't sell. So be careful.
The cheapest route is to publish ebooks via somewhere like
smashwords. There are no setup charges. They just take a percentage of the book sales, so that's the safest route. Their ebooks are DRM-free so you don't have the DRM costs to worry about either. The downside is that smashwords requires the books to be uploaded in Word format as they have software that converts .doc files to all the various ebook formats.
Paperbacks are a different matter. You need to set yourself up as a publishing company and buy a block of ISBNs. The ISBNs
must be registered in the name of your company and must be purchased from the ISBN agency. In the UK this is
Nielsen UK.
There is no such thing as "secondhand" ISBNs. An ISBN is allocated to a specific publisher and cannot be transferred.
You also need a printer and, unless you plan on distributing the books yourself, a distributor. I use Lightning Source for both. Note that Lightning Source is a printer not a publisher.
Lightning Source is a reputable company and is linked with Ingram so I thoroughly recommend it. Lulu is fine if you want to print and bind a book for a limited readership (for example, lecture notes for your students or memoirs that are only of interest to your family) but Lightning Source is better for books that you want to sell commercially.
Self-publishing works best for niche books. These are usually non-fiction in a subject area that may not have many followers, but there's less competition from other books. Self-publishing for fiction is very difficult (although not impossible) as there's too much competition.
This isn't a reflection on the quality of fiction writing in self-publishers. It's a simple matter of economics. In a free market economy, the best-selling products aren't necessarily the best quality products. This is true just as true for books as it is for, say, commercial software.
A self-publisher is competing against all the big publishing houses that can afford advertising on billboards and other marketing strategies, such as paying book shops to display their books in the shop window or, in some cases, pay the book shops to list the book on their "top 20" recommended book list.
The big publishing houses can also afford to cover "sale or returns", which brick and mortar book stores require. With sale or return, book stores can return unsold books to the publisher. The publisher has to pay for the cost of printing those books. The books are often returned in an unsaleable condition and have to be pulped.
Most self-publishers can't cover those costs, so they have to rely on sales through on-line book stores, such as Amazon.
Which is why self-publishing works best for niche subjects. When a potential buyer searches for books in that subject, they are usually only presented with a small list of titles, so your books stands more chance of being noticed.
However, there have been notable cases of self-published fiction writers getting into the mainstream, so it is possible. The main thing is to remember that when you're dealing with the publishing side of things, you have to think like a business executive not like a writer.
Can tikz coordinates be exported to a text file, while the document is rendered?
Let the document be:
\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\coordinate(vertexA) at (0, 10);
\coordinate(vertexB) at (5, 8);
\coordinate...
A very useful one is that \romannumeral expands everything on its way until it finds an integer. If the integer is negative, it expands to nothing. This can be used to fully expand something as follows:
\def\a{\b}\def\b{\c}\def\c{\d}\def\d{1}
\expandafter\show\romannumeral-`\0\a
Here -`0 is n...
