pod publishing

Gotta warn you

Amazon is raising its print prices June 20, which means authors have to raise their prices or not list their print books there anymore. It depends a bit on the book, but with some I’m going to have to jack up the price by $5, which seems like a lot to me. E-book prices aren’t affected, but if for some reason you’ve been thinking about buying a hard copy from me or any other indie writer, I’d certainly recommend doing it before June 20!

Doing a hardcover book in KDP

So, the proof of the hardcover edition of A Dislocated World showed up. The proof took longer to get here than a normal paperback proof, and I don’t know if that’s because this is in beta or if that should always be expected.

Honestly, I think it looks pretty good, although I have no idea how durable the binding is going to be or anything.

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The stupid banner is annoying, of course. But the cover template gave a pretty accurate idea of what would be visible and what would not be.

The cover is (quite) matte, and the art is printed directly on the cover—just like you see with a lot of YA nonfiction titles. There’s no jacket, but hopefully it’s a little more durable for the librarians out there.

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Good luck proofing that cover text, though!

With this particular book, I did not have to adjust the interior layout. The binding’s a bit tight, though, so the gutter is a little tight as well.

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I feel like this is good enough, but certainly if you need to adjust the layout from paper to hardcover, I would throw any extra margin space right into that gutter. If people have to force the book flat to read the text near the gutter, then that will significantly reduce the lifespan of the book, which will make the librarians all sad again.

I approved it for publication as well as the large-print edition of Tribulations, so they should both show up on Amazon soon. The hardcover can’t be put on expanded distribution (at least not yet), so keep that in mind if you’re thinking of doing one.

Just one of those days that makes you technophobic...

I got the large-print proof of Tribulations, and there were some changes that needed to be made both to the cover and to the interior.

So I had to fire up my old computer, which…yeah. At this point I’m like, How did I survive with this thing? Everything takes FOREVER.

But I made the changes and put the files on the new computer to upload. And then Amazon started doing the same damned thing it did last time I tried to upload the large-print version of Tribulations, which was to not process a PNG file. Keep in mind, it did fine with a PNG file when I did the hardcover version of A Dislocated World a whopping two day ago.

So I had to work with GIMP on the new computer and generate a PDF file. Currently Amazon is chewing over the print preview—fingers crossed I can order a second (and maybe even final!) proof sometime today.

Is this all because the book is so damned big?

Lordy

I had one of those impulses that finds you THREE HOURS LATER cursing your own very nature. Amazon has started offering the ability to make hardcovers, and while I don’t think that’s necessary for the fiction, A Dislocated World has sold quite a bit in paper, plus it seems to be of interest to the sorts of institutions that might prefer hardcover. And of course I was like, How hard can it be! I’ve already got it going on in paper!

The interior didn’t require changes—the hardcover are available in a more limited range of sizes, but luckily (?) A Dislocated World is my only paperback already in the correct size.

The cover is the sticky bit, because you can’t just adjust your existing paper cover—much like with the large-print edition, it’s too different. I put together a new one from scratch, which was when I discovered that my existing version of GIMP doesn’t actually play that well with the new computer. They’re putting out a new version that will, but it’s not quite ready yet.

I powered through and have ordered a proof of the hardcover, so I’ll let everyone know how that works (it’s still in beta, according to Amazon).

The business with GIMP made me realize that I needed to look at some of my other software. I was wondering if TextEdit had advanced to the point where I could just not use LibreOffice, but looking at it, I don’t think it has—it just edits text, and I need more. But I am updating stuff, so hopefully everything will be a little more stable and smoother now. (ETA: There is also Pages, which I’ve never used before. I might give that a go.)

Hmm....

So, in theory the trade paperback of Tribulations is up on Amazon, but if you actually go to the link it tells you that the book is temporarily out of stock. I know that there have been supply-chain issues affecting physical books, so that might be at play here (although A Dislocated World is still selling paper copies). Maybe it’s just too soon and the book has been approved but not produced. I’m going to hang off of putting up links & announcing the trade paperback until there’s an actual book that people can buy.

ETA: Now it’s up!

Progress report

Kind of a lot going on today. I laid out chapters 22-26, but I didn’t proofread them. Also the proof the trade paperback came today—the chapter ornaments actually looked fine. I have found a couple of very minor errors going through the large-print edition that would affect the trade paperback as well, so I’ll wait until I’m done proofreading it before I do what will hopefully be the final proof of the trade paperback edition.

The end of the Great Cover Revision of 2021

It’s done, baby! Everything’s getting approved!

Just to show the issues with printers: Here are two proofs from Amazon—produced by the same company at different times.

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I never altered the colors. You can also kind of tell that the image is further to the left on the top cover than on the bottom—that gets especially notable on the spine.

Amazon isn’t particularly bad at this—all printers do it, it’s just the nature of the beast. But it’s something to keep in mind when designing covers, you have to build in at least some error tolerance (and try not to be all Walter White about it).

And more covers

So! The Trust proof came back—I made a couple of changes (oh, the wandering bar code), but I didn’t think they required a second proof, so I’ve published that with the updated cover. I also updated the covers for the large-print editions of Trust and The Weirld, and I ordered proofs for those.

I know I’m going to have to re-do the covers for Tribulations and Trials, but that’s a matter for another day.

Covers covers covers

The proofs of The Weirld and Trang arrived today with the new covers, plus I updated the large-print cover of Trang. I approved The Weirld for sale with a minor change, but Trang is going to need another proof—like any other printer, when Amazon tells you “The bar code goes here!” what that really means is that the bar code will show up in that general area, hopefully. So I needed to put a little extra space between some of the elements and that bar code to give it the room it needs to roam….

As I was previewing the large-print edition of Trang, I realized there was an error inside the book—some of the page numbers in the first chapter are italicized when they shouldn’t be. So I went back and looked at the old files, and I can’t fix it—that was back when I was masochistic and laid out books in Word, which was never especially stable even back then. Nowadays, I can’t open a Word file and have the layout look anything like it used to. So, my apologies for the error, but it ain’t getting fixed!

Progress report

The large-print proof came back—it’s not bad, but I found some errors & will do a second proof.

The main annoying aspect is that GIMP, which I used to do the cover, doesn’t give you an accurate sense of type size. According to GIMP, I’m using 40, 60, or 80 point type for the cover—but it’s all smaller than the 18-point type in the interior. I don’t actually think there’s enough room on the cover to do my jacket copy in 18-point type, but I’ll definitely make it bigger than it is now.

Whoo!

The large-print edition is done! Mostly! I think! I ordered the proof, anyway—we’ll see how everything looks in the finished product.

Hey, I now have some time to do things that aren’t indexing! It’s amazing!

Progress report

Part 2 is done! Whew, this has been some heavy sledding. I did a bit of Part 3, and then I figured that since I am about two-thirds of the way through it, I really should input the page numbers into the large-print index layout. So I did that!

It’s been a solid week since I started this index—ugh. It’s certainly helping the trade paperback edition as well, but it is a little frustrating to know that I can’t put either print edition up until I finish eating this elephant. I guess it’s better to do the work now than to mail off review copies and get told the index sucks ass….

Progress report

Kind of an ugh day—the pollen count is…where it is. I’m partially through Part 2, which is slow going because 1. Part 2 is HUGE, and 2. there are definitely a lot more errors in it. The good news is that transferring things from a trade paperback index to a large-print index is definitely a really good way to proofread—I’m catching a lot of typos, or places where the trade paperback index is off by a page. The bad news is that of course finding and fixing those errors takes a lot of time.

Then on top of everything, the copy editor contacted me to tell me he couldn’t find the Tribulations layout. Turns out that I had deleted the PDF, so I had to convert the chapters and put them together again. That also might be a good thing in the long run, since the way I had done the PDF before made it harder to work with. (I honestly don’t really understand the different flavors of PDFs, I’ve just realized that if you want to do this with a PDF, you should make it this was in Scribus, but if you want to do that, you should make it that way.)

Progress report

I went to work on Part 2, and of course I forgot that, given the length of the chapter, I should stop every 10-20 pages and make sure nothing’s been missed. I was 100+ pages in (it’s a looong chapter) before I went back and realized there was an error on about page 30 that will probably affect the rest of the chapter. Tomorrow!

Progress report

I was a little light on sleep, so I thought that today, instead of doing the Part 2 layout, I’d set up the rest of the large-print edition in LibreOffice so that it would all be set to be laid out.

Aaaaand in the process, I realized that the Strike Thru coding in LibreOffice didn’t translate to Scribus. Furthermore, it never translated, meaning that the trade paperback doesn’t have things struck out in it, either!

I was a bit aiiigh! about it all, but then I realized that fixing that wouldn’t change the layout any. So as long as Proof #3 comes back OK, I think I can risk it and not order Proof #4. Since I was updating the interior anyway, I took the time to really look through the interior Proof #3 and found a couple of (very minor) things there to fix as well.

If you’re following along at home:

The Dislocated World trade paperback Proof #3 is coming to me soon, and hopefully once it gets here, I’ll be able approve the edition for sale

The Dislocated World large-print paperback is about halfway through production

Trials is still unwritten aside from part of the first draft. I thought I could switch off between writing and doing layouts, but I never seem to be able to do more than one thing at a time….