Well, it’s an exciting day for me. My first paperback proofs arrived just after I’d finished my scrambled eggs on toast (I wasn’t constantly checking the tracking information all morning, honestly). It’s always scary to reach the next new stage of the publication journey, and as I’m a glutton for punishment I decided to attempt hard copy versions of both of my current e-books at the same time.
I’ll post in more detail about the process and thoughts that went into it at another time, but I wanted to share both the good and the bad in real time. There’s a huge amount of information on the web these days, advice for writers, and for self-publishing (usually connected with someone suggesting you give them money of course) but some decisions that should be simple and straightforward are far from it. In this particular case, using the KDP platform, what size should my paperbacks be, and what is the appropriate formatting? The answer, as is annoyingly common, seemed to be ‘it depends’, so I chose to try one in 8 by 5 inches, and one in 5.06 by 7.81, margins, gutters, fonts all tweaked to fit both options, hair duly pulled out as I tried a cover creator version for one and print ready pdf for the other, neither quite fitting as the guidance suggested they would, naturally, and the delights of Acrobat meaning the quite specific colour I’d coded (not just looked at) changed when you came to print.
So here, with you flashing you my frillies and letting you see the process in all its glory, warts and all, are the results so far. I’d vainly hoped, of course, that both would be perfect but let’s face it, the World doesn’t work like that. So onto the next round of revisions and minor tweaks. Fortunately not too many, all the hard work I put in on formatting worth the wait. I’d already fixed one of the covers (the lovely pink background and guidelines you see here now sorted) using a trick with Photoshop, so that will be ok, but now it’s onto a further round of final tweaking layouts, and deciding whether I need consistency in sizes at this stage, or if I should proceed with one of each and see which appeals to readers. Man in the Bath may even be almost ready to go, but I need to check through first.
I’ll post another update on my paperback versions when I’ve spotted errors or decide to launch!
One of these (Man in the Bath) is a rewritten older novel, with a fully self-produced cover, the second (The Raven Sound) is brand spanking new, and with the wisdom of investing in a designer for the cover (another post on this process and decision to follow, along with the working images). Both are available in e-book now https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kit-Derrick/e/B08XZRGRVK
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Stay safe,
Kit
Well done, lots of luck