Wednesday, 22 April 2020
Tuesday, 18 February 2020
Designing the cover of The Last Prabhu
Designing the cover of The Last Prabhu
How did the cover of The Last Prabhu come to be?
There are several elements that I wanted the cover to reflect:
1. Migration: This is represented by the image of the pilgrim that takes up a big amount of space on the cover. The book is a story of the migration of my ancestors and I wanted this to be clearly represented. The image in my mind is that of a group of pilgrims who migrated all the way from the North of India to Goa, bringing with them their language, culture, religion, beliefs, deities, food habits.
2. DNA: The primary instrument to research the migration of my ancestors was a deep and thorough analysis of my DNA with state of the art tests. This is reflected by the DNA double helix. In fact, there are 3 of these images to reflect the fact that they mutate and thus enable us to discover the migration patterns.
3. Ancient documents: These are represented by an image of a page from the minutes of a meeting of Aldona’s comunidade written in the Goykannada script that can be seen in the background.
4. Goa: At the left hand corner, I have placed a photo of a typical Goan window with a view of the river made in the ancestral home of my wife in Badem, Salvador do Mundo. Another element that represents Goa is the color of the cover, that reminds the reader of Goa’s red laterite soil that my ancestors first treaded when they arrived in Goa.
The cover was designed by collating these 4 images using the photoshop programme Affinity Photo.
How did the cover of The Last Prabhu come to be?
There are several elements that I wanted the cover to reflect:
1. Migration: This is represented by the image of the pilgrim that takes up a big amount of space on the cover. The book is a story of the migration of my ancestors and I wanted this to be clearly represented. The image in my mind is that of a group of pilgrims who migrated all the way from the North of India to Goa, bringing with them their language, culture, religion, beliefs, deities, food habits.
2. DNA: The primary instrument to research the migration of my ancestors was a deep and thorough analysis of my DNA with state of the art tests. This is reflected by the DNA double helix. In fact, there are 3 of these images to reflect the fact that they mutate and thus enable us to discover the migration patterns.
3. Ancient documents: These are represented by an image of a page from the minutes of a meeting of Aldona’s comunidade written in the Goykannada script that can be seen in the background.
4. Goa: At the left hand corner, I have placed a photo of a typical Goan window with a view of the river made in the ancestral home of my wife in Badem, Salvador do Mundo. Another element that represents Goa is the color of the cover, that reminds the reader of Goa’s red laterite soil that my ancestors first treaded when they arrived in Goa.
The cover was designed by collating these 4 images using the photoshop programme Affinity Photo.
Friday, 14 February 2020
Wrongly accused man exonerated thanks to genetic genealogy after spending 14 years in California jail
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/13/us/california-dna-exoneration-ricky-davis/index.html
Ghost population of ancient humans discovered in Africa
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/13/world/ancient-humans-africa-intl-scli-scn/index.html
Saturday, 25 January 2020
Publishing in India
Publishing in India
Amazon.com offers Kindle eBooks worldwide but when I realized that it does not offer a book in paperback format in India, I was disappointed. Many readers wish to hold a hard copy in their hands rather than read a eBook on an iPad. I therefore needed to find a publisher who could deliver The Last Prabhu in paperback format in India. From the several options that I discovered through Google (see for example https://indiablooms.com/finance-details/8164/five-popular-self-publishing-companies-of-india.html), I chose pothi.com because the processes the company uses are very similar to amazon.com that I was already familiar with.
How does it work? It is quite simple. You first register yourself with a user name, email and a new password. You then format your manuscript according to the guidelines that are clearly described by the publishing company and save it as a pdf file. Since I use a mac, I used Pages, Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft Word, to write the text.
Next, you prepare your cover; pothi.com offers a cover design wizard tool that can be used for the purpose.
It is important to ensure that the pdf text file and the cover dimensions are compatible. I had decided to use a 6 by 9 inch size. I resized the pdf text file to 6 x 9 using a free tool available on the internet (e.g.https://docupub.com/pdfresize/). To resize the cover, you can use any photoshop programme e.g. the free tool GIMP or the more comfortable Adobe or Affinity that you will have to pay for. I used the tool Affinity photo both to prepare the cover and resize it.
Now all you need to do is to go to the pothi.com website, key in the details such as author’s name, book title name etc. and upload the files. That’s it.
My experience with pothi.com has been excellent: when I had difficulties uploading the files, customer service responded to my query within 12 hours, immediately pinpointed the error (incompatible file sizes) with suggestions on how to correct the issue and even offered to do it for me if I so desired. Since I do not have any experience with the other self-publishing companies in India, I cannot comment on them or compare them with pothi.com but I assume they must also be good and efficient.
There are several advantages of using a self-publishing company over a traditional publisher. Pothi publishes on demand and there is therefore no need to print a pre-determined number of books and block storage space in your cellar and wonder what to do if there are unsold copies lying around. Since orders are placed directly with the company who also delivers the books, the author is freed from the task of processing orders and deliveries.
Another important decision that the author has to make is on pricing. There are 3 cost items to consider: printing costs, royalty of the publishing company and royalty of the author. GST is deducted from the author’s royalty. Additionally, if the author does not reside in India as in my case, the author’s royalty is transferred via paypal and therefore currency conversion fees as well as paypal’s fees will be deducted. In short, do not expect to get rich but the pleasure of being able to publish your book easily and without any hassles, reach the audience that you wish to reach and spread the message that you wish to spread more than compensates for it.
As always, please send me your comments or questions on this blog: thelastprabhu.blogspot.com
Amazon.com offers Kindle eBooks worldwide but when I realized that it does not offer a book in paperback format in India, I was disappointed. Many readers wish to hold a hard copy in their hands rather than read a eBook on an iPad. I therefore needed to find a publisher who could deliver The Last Prabhu in paperback format in India. From the several options that I discovered through Google (see for example https://indiablooms.com/finance-details/8164/five-popular-self-publishing-companies-of-india.html), I chose pothi.com because the processes the company uses are very similar to amazon.com that I was already familiar with.
How does it work? It is quite simple. You first register yourself with a user name, email and a new password. You then format your manuscript according to the guidelines that are clearly described by the publishing company and save it as a pdf file. Since I use a mac, I used Pages, Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft Word, to write the text.
Next, you prepare your cover; pothi.com offers a cover design wizard tool that can be used for the purpose.
It is important to ensure that the pdf text file and the cover dimensions are compatible. I had decided to use a 6 by 9 inch size. I resized the pdf text file to 6 x 9 using a free tool available on the internet (e.g.https://docupub.com/pdfresize/). To resize the cover, you can use any photoshop programme e.g. the free tool GIMP or the more comfortable Adobe or Affinity that you will have to pay for. I used the tool Affinity photo both to prepare the cover and resize it.
Now all you need to do is to go to the pothi.com website, key in the details such as author’s name, book title name etc. and upload the files. That’s it.
My experience with pothi.com has been excellent: when I had difficulties uploading the files, customer service responded to my query within 12 hours, immediately pinpointed the error (incompatible file sizes) with suggestions on how to correct the issue and even offered to do it for me if I so desired. Since I do not have any experience with the other self-publishing companies in India, I cannot comment on them or compare them with pothi.com but I assume they must also be good and efficient.
There are several advantages of using a self-publishing company over a traditional publisher. Pothi publishes on demand and there is therefore no need to print a pre-determined number of books and block storage space in your cellar and wonder what to do if there are unsold copies lying around. Since orders are placed directly with the company who also delivers the books, the author is freed from the task of processing orders and deliveries.
Another important decision that the author has to make is on pricing. There are 3 cost items to consider: printing costs, royalty of the publishing company and royalty of the author. GST is deducted from the author’s royalty. Additionally, if the author does not reside in India as in my case, the author’s royalty is transferred via paypal and therefore currency conversion fees as well as paypal’s fees will be deducted. In short, do not expect to get rich but the pleasure of being able to publish your book easily and without any hassles, reach the audience that you wish to reach and spread the message that you wish to spread more than compensates for it.
As always, please send me your comments or questions on this blog: thelastprabhu.blogspot.com
Wednesday, 15 January 2020
The Last Prabhu, second completely revised edition has now been published on Amazon and Pothi.com
Dear readers
It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the second completely revised edition of The Last Prabhu has now been published and can be ordered in both Kindle eBook as well as paperback formats from the Amazon.com store.
Please note that unlike the Kindle eBook format that is available worldwide, Amazon.com paperback formats are not available in India. For this reason, the paperback format of The Last Prabhu has also been published in India by Pothi.com and is now available on Pothi.com's store at https://pothi.com/pothi/node/200628
Comments and questions can be addressed to me on this blog.
Please share this information with any reader who may be interested in books on Goa or genetic genealogy. Many thanks.
Kind regards
Bernardo
It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the second completely revised edition of The Last Prabhu has now been published and can be ordered in both Kindle eBook as well as paperback formats from the Amazon.com store.
Please note that unlike the Kindle eBook format that is available worldwide, Amazon.com paperback formats are not available in India. For this reason, the paperback format of The Last Prabhu has also been published in India by Pothi.com and is now available on Pothi.com's store at https://pothi.com/pothi/node/200628
Comments and questions can be addressed to me on this blog.
Please share this information with any reader who may be interested in books on Goa or genetic genealogy. Many thanks.
Kind regards
Bernardo
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