So a writer friend suggested that I should look into getting my books formatted for Print On Demand.
Amazon and IngramSpark both have pretty robust, simple to use (theoretically) services for providing customers a print copy of your book at a more-or-less reasonable rate.
Sadly, their software isn’t as easy as they would have you believe… the hype would have you believe that if you’ve already formatted your book for eBook publishing, all you have to do is click a few buttons and poof, ready Print On Demand book.
Of course, life is never that easy.
Now, all that stated, this is still lightyears ahead of what was available even 10 years ago, and I’m happy to report that the progress is going well. The new cover looks acceptable (not great, but considering my budget for covers is limited, still pretty good… next time I’m going to have to spring for full wrap-around cover art, rather than just the cover image itself, but we live and we learn), and the formatting makes it look pretty much like a book, which is great!
I’ve also learned a few tricks that I’m going to use moving forward, but mostly it’s just a process. It takes me about a full day of work to prepare my novels for digital distribution, and now I know it takes about another full day to prepare them for Print on Demand.
Speaking of which… today’s work is doing this exact same thing for my last novel (Tintian and the King’s Claw) so that it can be purchased in dead-tree format as well… not exactly “fun” work, but hey, it’s all part of the job!
Anyway! Thank you to everyone who’s purchased my work in the last week, I really appreciate it, and I’ll let you guys know when the print version is available!