Sensuous

The print proof of Academic Pursuits has arrived in the mail. Createspace  made a couple of changes recently—one of them is about making previously premium distributing channels free. The other is the option of matte covers. Academic Pursuits has one and I really like it—it's smooth and sensuous, and the glossy cover seems tacky by comparison.

My print sales are negligible but I like to have a few print copies of my books around, just in case. They are more tangible. I tend to buy print copies of ebooks I really liked, too. 

Swag

GRNW is around the corner and m/m authors around the country are madly ordering personalized bookmarks, pens, lens cleaners, etc. to give away. Lately I've been pondering their practicality. The most useful swag I ever picked up was one of those rubber jar opener thingies—I use it all the time. However, I couldn't tell you at gunpoint the name of the author it was from.

I became convinced that the best giveaway for an author is a story. From now on the only swag I'll do printed booklets of short stories and sample chapters. I mean, they are only good for two things: reading and starting fires. They'll have at least a fifty percent chance to be read, probably more thanks to the prevalence of central heating.

Price wise they are at par with pens and pins. The cost depends on length but I know for fact that I can get a 5,000 word short done well under two bucks, shipping and handling included.

For anyone interested, I get my booklets printed at The Book Patch. Setting up a book there is similar to CreateSpace but simpler. Also, you don't have to put your book up for sales anywhere. Their templates are easy to use. 

Vintage Monday: The Book

I have a few of these types of photos in my collection—man and women, dressed formally, sitting in the garden with a book, looking serious. People in those days tended to present a solemn expression for the camera and all pictures were deliberate and posed, yet these still have a certain candid quality that make them more attractive to me than studio shots.

On a book related note, I spent the whole weekend formatting Dead in the Desert for ebook and print, and the process left me tired and irritable. Despite all my previous experience I made several mistakes that I had to go back and correct.

Formatting for print was the biggest headache. Fortunately, Createspace now accepts .doc and .docx documents for uploads, not just PDF. On Macs when you save a word doc with section breaks into PDF it creates separated files for each section. Bloody annoying. You have to find some software to stitch the parts back together. Alternately, you can replace the section breaks with page breaks, but that messes with the headers and footers—the main benefit of section that you can have different header and footer in each. So you can have page numbers start on page one of chapter one, instead of the title.

Not having to make PDF, simplifies things a little, but Word, being the Spawn of Satan, is still a pain in the ass to work with. For example, your layout will be flipped. Print books start on a right page but a Word document always start on the left. So when setting document margins inside is the outside and vice versa. The same principle applies if you're doing something fancy like putting page numbers, your name, and title at the edge instead of the middle of the page. You most likely to want them to align with the outer edges, and that means that in your word doc they need to look like they are inside.

Anyway, I uploaded the whole damn thing to CreateSpace and they wrote back that my cover is less than 200 dpi resolution, and might look blurry in print. No, it's frakking not. It is 300 dpi. But of course, they said the same damn thing about Dead in L.A.'s cover and it look fine.

Minding your p's and q's has a whole new meaning when it comes to digital publishing.