I may seem to have been missing lately, although some of my fellow indie authors might see me in groups or on the usual haunts. I’ve had a few setbacks with getting my projects going. I work full time at a day job, and this writing gig is now assuredly a part time job. I’d far rather be doing this than working part time at Starbucks or McDonald’s! But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Along with the day job being more taxing than it should have been during the summer, I also lost my last remaining greyhound last Monday. He was my pal, and I’m still having a hard time. Although now I have a cat. The last time I did serious writing with a cat around was years ago. I think it’s an adjustment.
As for the print books project I’d been putting off and putting off, I now am fully involved and made a deadline for November 1 to have The Inventor’s Son at least in the publishing stage. I started the project in CreateSpace, and those of you who frequent kboards or some of the other indie author hangouts online know that some of us have had the option to publish a print version of our books directly with Amazon through KDP. When the option magically appeared last week, I thought about it for about 5 minutes, and then decided to proceed with my original plan to use CreateSpace, at least in the short term. I figure I can always change the trim size and get a new ISBN in the future if I decide to go fully with Amazon, and who knows, maybe CreateSpace is getting melded into Amazon’s KDP service in the near future. For right now, I’m only concerned with getting the book ready for the holidays.
Initially, I will offer the first three full-size books in print. I don’t plan on making the prequel novella available in print unless there’s some kind of demand for it. I tend to use that book as a lead magnet anyway, so it’s really better as an eBook, in my opinion.
I’ve had a few issues that I ran into while making the print book files. It’s not as simple or as easy as some people would like you to believe. I tried using a file that I compiled using Scrivener, and I thought that would work, until I started getting “fancy.” I wanted to use Goudy Trajan Regular font for the chapter titles and for the headers and footers. That font just would not embed, which, if you want to create a pdf file, is essential to be able to do. And so I tried to remove it from everywhere, substituting with another font… Yeah, that wasn’t working. So I took the drastic step of “going nuclear” and making a fresh, unformatted file (no italics!) and started with the CreateSpace provided 5.25 X 8 inch template. I’m pretty sure this is going to work. Hopefully once I upload the new file the previewer on CreateSpace won’t spit out any issues. Once that’s all done, it’s time for the cover!
Speaking of the cover, I did something really dumb last year when making up my spiffy covers; I flattened all the layers before I saved the file, making the original cover files essentially useless. I can pretty quickly fix that problem, though, and make up my cover files once I know what size the spine needs to be. I’m much faster with Photoshop this year than I was with GIMP last year, and I can do a lot more with Ps than GIMP, so I’m optimistic that I’ll get that phase done quickly.
I want The Inventor’s Son finished in time for a cross-author promotion I’m planning to be part of a little later in November. The idea being “Buy the print book and get the Kindle version for free instantly (instant gratification)” and the author running it seems to do really well with the print books, so hey, I say let’s give it a shot. You’ll be hearing more about it soon.
Also, on an unrelated note, I will be taking the Author Social Media Deep Dive and moving it to this blog, so I’ll have just the two blogs (this one and the one on my website). The theme of SB James Doing the Write Thing has morphed into a more author-centric blog, and I find I have no need for the separate Social Media Deep Dive blog anymore. You’ll start seeing those posts and a new category here soon!
SB James, Doing the Write Thing 