Wow, is it quiet online today–and off. The weather is vaguely unsettled, so it’s not too hot, and it will be sunny one moment and suddenly pouring rain, then sunny again. My neighbors seem to be out for the day. My neighborhood, in general, is so quiet, I’m aware of how much noise one car makes going down the road (it’s amazing)–and I’m at least 150 feet from any road. But today borders on unearthly. Everyone must be on vacation!
I’m setting up editions of Mortal Touch, in between chewing over Chapter 16 of The Longer the Fall. The more I write on TLtF, the more I want to cut from the first half, but right now, I just need to keep on going. I went through MT last night and made some minor corrections. Then I tweaked the front cover color balance a bit. I uploaded the corrected book block and the tweaked cover to my Lulu account, because revisions are free of charge there (LSI makes me pay for every revision). I’ve ordered a copy to see how the cover prints–it tends to skew red too much, and prints dark, so I made it lighter and more blue. I need to upload the corrected book block to Search Inside the Book, the Kindle edition, and the CreateSpace edition.
Yep, I finally caved and switched the Amazon paperback edition to CreateSpace. They’re waiving the set-up fee for “Pro,” and I’ll make much more per copy with each sale. The books will ship faster, too. Right now, that’s still switching over. I got my new block of 100 ISBN numbers from Bowker and I’ve assigned ISBN’s to all the editions of MT, TLtF and Gideon Redoak I plan to release.
I’ve sold a couple more paperback editions of MT, and another Kindle edition. At least, I think I have. I’m baffled at the moment because on July 25th, MT’s Sales Rank plummeted from “remainder territory” to under 100K. Cool, I thought, a sale! Except…no order shows up in my account with LSI. Did someone buy the book from Amazon and then change their mind and cancel? I guess that could have happened, but, wah! I’m hoping it’s a glitch with LSI. They’ve been announcing some big update to their website, with scheduled down time, this coming Tuesday. I’ll check after that and see.
I’ve heard complaints that Amazon was telling customers that books printed by LSI would take weeks to ship (part of that whole “Amazon forcing publishers to use their POD” controversy). That didn’t seem to be the case with MT, but it was true that you couldn’t seem to select the fastest shipping options. Switching to CreateSpace should fix that–at least, it better! That’s Amazon’s primary rationale for implementing the policy!
Meanwhile, I’m setting up a hardcover edition of MT with LSI. The trickiest part of that is designing a dust jacket. I have a template from LSI, and they generate the bar code for me, for free. But the sizes are different and there are new components, like the inside flaps, and so on. But the book block is the same. That’s why I’m using the 6″ x 9″ trim size, it can be bound in paperback or hardcover without a change, except to the copyright page.
I’m doing this because I’ll be exhibiting at the New England Library Association show in October, and the copy of MT I donated to the Pepperell library has been very popular. Libraries prefer hardcover editions, and the only upfront cost is the set-up fee and the proof copy. I plan to set up all my titles in hardcover and paperback editions, so I may as well get the procedures down.
The last “cover” I need to design is a CD case insert for the e-book and audio-book editions. But that should be much easier than a dust jacket! The dust jacket is fussy, with all the bleed allowances and the allowance for the fold-over on the flaps and everything.
The blackberries are ripening. I’m going to have more blackberries than I know what to do with! They’re huge and plump and juicy because we’ve had so much rain–July was one of the wettest on record, with twice the normal amount of rainfall and twice the average number of thunderstorms, many of them destructive or deadly. Alas, the blackberries are also a bit watery and not as tasty as usual because we’ve had so much rain. But they’re still good! What the tomatoes and peppers will do is still an open question.