Simply Publishing: Raising the issuu with SelfPublishing Periodicals and Portfolios By Kurt Spickerman Using WordPress isn’t exactly intuitive to me, so setting up a portfolio has been a serious learning process (as well as a concerted exercise in extreme procrastination). Most recently, I’ve been stuck on how to incorporate written documents and booklets so that they will exhibit the form in which they were intended to be displayed—e.g. making a book look like a book. At first I thought PDF, but, while I could sandwich the content between front and back cover, it wasn’t an intuitive reading process. After exploring some options, I discovered a few online services that provide a means for “publishing” your work online, then embedding it into a blog or WordPress page. The first service I looked at was FlipSnack (and, yes, I’m as confused by that name as you are…and strangely hungered). FlipSnack converts PDFs to flash documents, and the result is a crisp, tightly formatted display, mimicking the page turning experience down to the animated page fold and the “shwifting” sound of the paper. Unfortunately, with their no-cost plan they limit the number of document pages you can embed to fifteen, won’t publish more than 1 GB of data, and force users to display the FlipSnack watermark (how embarrassing). These restrictions weren’t going to work with my needs, so I went with the next online publishing service I stumbled upon: issuu. issuu also converts your PDFs to flash, and, like FlipSnack, it features a nice reading platform with page-turning animation (though it lacks the sound effects of FlipSnack). What really sets issuu apart from the other is its news feed of user publications. FlipSnack features one of these, as well, but the size and variety of issuu’s makes the size of its scope much more impressive. And that community is really pretty happening. Publishers like Vice are distributing their stuff through here, and publishing your own work alongside theirs can make you feel like you’re really going places (even if you’re “lifestyle magazine” is written in Comic Sans and consists entirely of photos of kittens biting babies). Beginning the journey to online magazine self-publishing starts with clicking the “Upload” tab in the menu bar at the top of the screen. After creating a username and password, you will be taken to an upload screen where you can choose to either browse your home computer for documents, or dragand-drop them onto the website. (Either option seems to work perfectly fine.) Once your document is submitted, issuu works its magic, and in a matter of seconds your document is available to be published to the user community. At this point you can view your document—and so can anyone else! (Though you can opt to keep it private.) If you’ve got a really great product, other people in the issuu community may “Like” it, share it with their friends, or even choose to follow you—and you can keep track of any of these activities through the provided analytics page, tracking your statistics over the last several months. There are also all the standard social media methods
issuu’s community feed
of sharing, from Facebook, to email (there are seven options in all, including LinkedIn). And everything is accessible from their smartphone app. Once you’re all published, it’s easy to repost stuff to your blog or website. issuu makes no bones about letting you share your information as many times as you want. What they do
This is a book I converted using issuu.
limit is how many items you can publish but not share with the community—with the bargain-rate free plan, you only get 25. Plenty. And you can even control exactly what the display interface will look like, with the “design your own widget” options. Overall, I’m really glad I stumbled upon this company and its service. After watching a couple YouTube videos about embedding code, and then seeing how easy it was to create
my own documents to embed with issuu, my portfolio was up and running in no time!
The bad:
Navigation isn’t the most intuitive: after choosing to view my published document, time and again I was at a loss for how to return to my publication list (I also had a massive head cold, so I was like a toddler over here). There is a menu bar below the publication, but hovering over the icons doesn’t elicit any kind of description. All you can do is click randomly until
The mysterious menu bar.
you hit something that gets you where you need to go. (Hint: look for “Publisher Tools.”) Another issue I ran up against repeatedly was the need to reformat stuff prior to uploading. If, for example, you intend on showing only a few pages of a journal or book, and your excerpt begins on page 2, issuu will ignore pagination conventions and all of your margins will be reversed—in other words, you must have a cover of some sort, or issuu will work with what it’s got. (This can be extremely annoying, but it makes sense, if you think about it.) Finally, a note to would-be magazine publishers in general: While all services like this make it easier for people to communicate ideas and knowledge in ways that were never before possible, they are also akin to the self-publishing movement in books—and susceptible the same shortcomings. The most notable of these, in my eyes, is poor writing and/or editing. Looking over the types of materials published on issuu, it’s clearly a very popular place for design students to share their portfolios, and these portfolios are the biggest perpetrators of poor proofreading—sort of ironic, given a portfolio should represent a student’s finest work. So, if your language of choice is images, consider hiring an editor to go over your writing— or at least share it with your friend who read all those Harry Potter books—before you go to press. You’ll look smarter, and readers with better grammar than you won’t be too distracted by your writing mechanics to give the rest of your portfolio the attention it deserves—or give you a job.