I don't know about you (well, obviously I don't, I'm not even sure who you are) but Amazon and their associates have the happy knack of pleasantly surprising me.
For example, I've recently been wrestling with turning one of my 'nostalgedy' books into a print edition via Createspace. This started out as an innocent fishing trip to see how much it might cost to do this and sort of escalated out of control.
To be fair, it's been a relatively painless process although it took a bit more editing and formatting that I anticipated. The most tricky bit was the cover, largely because (a) it hadn't occurred to me that a Kindle cover is just fine and dandy but doesn't have a back cover and spine, so you can't just upload your Kindle cover and forget all about it. Well, you can and I did but you just finish up with blanks where the title and the blurb should be on the spine and the rear cover. We're not all locked up yet, you know! Secondly, (b) you need Adobe Photoshop or similar to use Createspace's cover template and I've never had anything remotely like that, nor would I know how to use it if I did. Cue screams of anguish to the chap in my village who does know what he's doing with these things and who managed to sort it all out for me.
When you have the content hammered down into a format that will work and the cover set up correctly, it then just remains to check it all online and order a proof copy for yourself to see what it will look like in reality. I was a bit disappointed at how much this was going to cost if I wanted it delivered in my lifetime. There are three delivery options, you see. In order of increasing cost I could either wait until March 23rd (this was on 8th February) or wait a fortnight or pay a huge amount and get it sent to me in the blink of an eye. I'm a cheapskate but I'm also an impatient cheapskate and I didn't fancy waiting until the end of March. I thought I could probably cope with waiting a couple of weeks but I resented this delay in the process, nevertheless tightness prevailed over urgency.
I could quite understand why it might take a while. After all, it had to be set up and printed in the good ol' U.S.A., packed and then despatched to the U.K. I was therefore surprised to be informed that it had been despatched the day after my order and I was even more astonished when it landed on my doormat just four days after my order (which included a weekend). I've often found, with Amazon et al, that the cheap-rate option can often result in a delivery that is at least as quick as the premium rate, all singing all dancing job.
So it was that I was able to press the 'Go' button and release 'The Things You See...' print edition onto an unsuspecting world on Valentine's Day. This is it:
Now available through all aspects of Amazon and should soon be available to order through your friendly, neighbourhood bookshop. Hope you like it. If it does reasonably well, the plan is to work my way back through the series and produce print editions of each in turn but I need to recover from this one, first ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment