Rosemary Kirstein

I’m settling down to the task of recreating the paperback version of The Steerswoman, to match the size of the other three volumes.

Recap of the issue:

As you may recall, when I published The Steerswoman in paperback through CreateSpace, I selected the 8-inch by 5.25 inch size.  I actually put a lot of thought into this choice, taking into account the page-count, font-size, and finally, how the book would actually feel in the reader’s hand.  8×5.25 seemed like it would be just right: a good-sized, substantial book, not too big, but not too small.  And when the proof copies arrived, I was pleased with the result, certain I’d made the right choice.  Even though the smaller size meant more pages, and the cost of printing was based entirely on the number of pages — even though it raised the print costs and cut into my profit — I thought the result was worth it.

Excellent!   With that done, I went on to production on Volume 2…

One problem:

The Steerswoman comes to about 97,000 words.  The Outskirter’s Secret? 138,000.

At 138,000 words, the page count went up to around 500 pages, and the production cost was so high that not only would my profits drop to zero, they’d actually go negative.  That’s right: I’d have to pay Amazon extra every time someone purchased a copy.  Alternatively, I could raise the price of the book, but charging over $30 for a trade paperback would severely decrease my sales.  To, that is,  approximately nada.

Obvious solution: bigger format.  At 9 by 6, the problem goes away completely!  Bigger pages = more words per page = fewer pages = lower costs.  Voila.

And by now I was familiar with CreateSpace’s process, and with its excellent user interface.  So I ramped up, and got the other three volumes out –but  in the larger size. So, not really a matched set…

But I knew I’d be returning to the issue later, and would re-do the first book to match the others.

And I’ve now decided that February is the time to do it!

Slight problem: CreateSpace no longer exists.

CreateSpace has been owned and run by Amazon for a while now, but during that time the Kindle  service started adding an option to create paperbacks as well as ebooks.  They actually streamlined the process so that you  could create your paperback from the ebook pretty easily.  But I had compared the two services, and chosen to go with CreateSpace for very good reasons, including a higher royalty, better distribution to non-Amazon markets, and faster payment.

But a few months ago, Amazon warned us that they were about to axe CreateSpace, and all our books were going to be shifted over to Kindle Paperback.  And in general, that’s not a bad thing.  They’ve actually adopted a lot of the CreateSpace advantages, and it’s nice to have all my sales on one report.

But they really want you to create your paperback from your ebook, and they tossed out the lovely CreateSpace paperback-creation interface.

And now I have to do more work by hand.  Fortunately, I can; I’ve got the chops.  But it is more fuss-intensive, because of the reformatting to the larger size and all.   But I also worry — is the paperback created by the Kindle paperback process going to look different from the CreateSpace books?  In subtle ways, perhaps, like quality of paper, thickness of cover-stock, color saturation on the covers?  There’s just no way to know until I do it.

Thus: possible can of worms…

Now, you might ask: Since Kindle wants you to make your paperback from your ebook, and you alread do have an ebook of The Steerswoman, why not just let Kindle do the work?

Well.  Two reasons.

First, the paperback covers are different from the ebook covers.  And for good reason: Something that looks eye-catching as an small image on a glowing screen might look like crap when it’s printed out in physical form.  I specifically made the ebook covers  uncrowded and clean-looking.  But that openness doesn’t work for a paperback; it just looks empty.  So I added the black bar background behind the title, to give it more presence, and to differentiate it more clearly from the map. But creating paperbacks automatically from the ebooks would put the ebook cover on the paperback.

Second reason: The paperbacks have all the typo corrections!  A lot of you have been alerting me to the typos (and thank you for that), and all those corrections went into the paperback versions.  And after this, I’m going to be recreating the inside of the ebooks using the text of the (hopefully) typo-free paperback versions.

But that’s a whole other task.  Right now, let’s get that large-format edition of The Steerswoman going.  Which, by the way, will involve recreating the cover, which is actually more difficult than resizing the text pages.

In other news: That non-flu cold thing knocked me back pretty hard.  I’ve been over it for a while now, but it pretty much ate up January for me, including my plan to have another internet fast.  I couldn’t just shift it on to Feebruary, because I had plans that involved a lot of internet accessing.  I felt that the internet fast did me some good, and I really do want to solidify that.  So… March?  Maybe?

News about people who are not me:

Have you seen this?

That’s right: Chad Orzel‘s latest, Breakfast with Einstein was featured in the New York Times Book Review, in a shortlist of new physics books.

“The nuclear physics of breakfast may not sound particularly appetizing, but Orzel is determined to put it on the menu. A physics professor at Union College, he is (rightly) concerned that quantum physics usually conjures up images of the bizarre and exotic, when its effects are in fact with us every day. ‘Even the most ordinary of activities, those that make up our morning routine, are fundamentally quantum,’ he reminds us.” — New York Times Book Review, Feb 9, 2019

I love it when good things happen to people I like.

Chad also writes science articles for the online edition of Forbes magazine.  If you love science, and want  layman-friendly news about what’s up lately in quantum research (like what’s all this fuss about a crisis in physics?  and do we really need another collider?), you should add him to your blog feed.

He also has his own website, of course, with all the info you might need or want,  including a personal blog.   You know, life of a scientist/science writer: family, non-science musings, dog pictures – the whole shebang.   If you think that real scientists are all  like Sheldon and the guys on The Big Bang theory — well, Chad’s blog can help you get over that.

Seriously.  Get over that.

Pretty sure it was the flu, after all.  Just after my last post it ramped up again, just to assert its dominance, I suppose.

But it seems to be gone now, and I’ve been back at the proofing and cover-fixing for The Lost Steersman…

Yep. That many.

Rather a lot had to be fixed… there was an issue with ellipses (“…”) where moving the text from Scrivener into Word for upload to Createspace caused them to be converted into three dots with spaces between (“. . .”).  According to some sources, that’s the way to do it (Little, Brown, and Chicago Manual of Style), and according to others (various semi-official internet sources) you can do it either way.  But the problem arose when the Createspace automatic layout software decided that the dots did not have to hang together, and if they occurred near the end of the line, one or two of ’em might end up on a whole new line.  Ugh.

So I decided No Splits, Dudes!   And I had to go in and change all the  dots-with-spaces into dots-without.   I’m glad I did it.

And then decided to reverse my previous trad-publisher’s inexplicable war against all hyphenated words.   Hyphenated words have their place.

And then I found a place, previously overlooked by me, where the trad-publisher’s copyeditor apparently did not understand a sentence.  So, they simply re-wrote it to what they figured I must have meant– unaware that it was a British-ism.  (“He was a moment understanding” is not the same as “He had a moment of understanding.”)

And then, the other errors, of which there were plenty.  Copy-and-paste from Scrivener generates a lot of mess.  I’ll try the export function next time instead.

So, as of now Createspace has the whole shebang for The Lost Steersman, and they’re reviewing it to make sure there are no problems on their end.  Then they’ll give me the okay.  After which I will order a new physical copy, just to make absolutely certain — because there are some things that just don’t show until you see it printed.  Like the previous color problems.

And that was my week: Coughing, proofing, writing (once I felt better),  some music.  My sister, meanwhile, has been basking in the Florida sun.  Here, it’s 12 degrees Fahrenheit (-11 Celsius).

I can take breather for a couple of days…