For the last couple of months, all of my paperbacks have been unavailable due to some quality control problems with KDP Paperback. The quality of their product is substantially inferior to CreateSpace, unfortunately. But for now, it still remains the best option for getting my books out in paperback, so that’s what I’m doing until I can put them up through Ingram Spark.
To mitigate the quality problems, I’ve made a new cover design which I hope to replicate across all of my paperback books. The biggest problem was that the cover was misaligned beyond the margin of error in the cover template, meaning that the front cover would bleed into the spine, or vice versa. As you can see, the new design has a solid background that wraps around the whole cover, with the text and art well outside of the margin of error. If Amazon screws this up, you’d be justified in asking customer service for another copy, or a refund.
In any case, I’m going to roll out the new paperbacks gradually over the next few months, as I manage to get to them. The inside content is changing slightly, in that I’m including the author’s notes at the end. I’m also adding chapter names to my earlier books, where previously they were simply “Chapter One” or “Chapter Two.” Other than that, everything is mostly the same.
I like the way the design for this one turned out. The paperback cover itself is slightly darker than the image shown, but all I’ve got right now is the proof, so I’ll post images after I’ve ordered a few author copies to sell. Hopefully by the end of this year, all of my books novella length and longer will be up in print as well as ebook!
If life had a crazy-meter, the needle on mine would be somewhere in the yellow green right now and trending toward the red.
Next week, Future Mrs. Vasicek and I will be traveling to Iowa for my nephew’s baptism. It’s going to be a big family affair. Future Mrs. Vasicek has met everyone already, minus some of the nieces and nephews, but this will be the first time that we’re all in the same place together. Should be fun, but also very busy.
Next month, we’re getting married, and that’s a whole other source of craziness right there. Good craziness, but craziness all the same. Things are coming together one thing at a time, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to figure out, and a bunch of unknown unknowns as well. It will probably take at least a couple of months after we’re married before everything fully shakes out.
As far as writing goes, I’m making slow but steady progress on Edenfall, and should still finish it before the wedding. I’ll share more details on that in the email newsletter that I plan to send out this week, but the short version is that I seem to be over the hump and making good progress. That’s where I’m putting most of my energy, so if the blog falls off for a while, don’t worry—I’m still here.
As for the publishing side of things, I’m figuring out how to get all my books out in print, which was something I thought I’d figured out back in January until I learned just how crappy KDP Paperback really is. That said, it’s the best option for the present time, so I’m trying to figure out how to work within those limitations and design covers that their POD printers won’t mangle too badly. Still, it’s going to be a while.
An area where I’ve really dropped the ball is short stories. It’s been months since I wrote the last one, and I need to put a bunch out on submission again too. Also, marketing is an area that I need to do better in. I’m experimenting a bit with AMS ads, but it is so freakishly complicated that I hardly know where to begin.
But reading is an area that I really need to do better. I try to spend an hour or two each night reading, but the last couple of weeks that hasn’t happened at all. My TBR list is about three shelves long right now, and that’s just the print books. That’s definitely an oversight that needs to be rectified.
At the same time, I’m well on my way toward collecting all of the works of David Gemmell, mostly through Paperback Swap. If everyone has a superpower, mine is the ability to acquire books, so Paperback Swap is a really fantastic way to leverage that. The Neverending Story is my favorite book, but David Gemmell is my favorite author, so I definitely want to have all of his books in my personal library.
That’s pretty much it. Still need to figure out cover work for Edenfall. Still need to assemble my first readers and get stuff figured out for that. All of these are good problems, though. Hopefully, I’ll be trading up for better problems in the very near future.
All of my books are available as ebooks, but only a few of them were available in print. Until now. If you’ve looked to buy one of my paperbacks, you may have noticed that none my books are available in print. Why?
TL;DR: KDP Paperback sucks monkey balls, and I’m not going to sell a book if I can’t assure my readers that the product will meet an acceptable level of quality.
I originally published my paperbacks through CreateSpace, before they were acquired by Amazon. The books they printed were great, and I never had a problem with any of them. On the contrary, whenever I had a question about the publishing process, their customer service team far exceeded my expectations and helped to shepherd many of my books to final publication.
I learned a lot of things the hard way, and made a lot of mistakes along the way. But that was all on me. When I finally figured out the right way to do what I wanted, I could alway count on CreateSpace to produce a quality product.
Fast forward to 2018. Amazon shuttered CreateSpace and began the migration of all of their books to KDP Paperback. I loved CreateSpace, but I also saw the writing on the wall, and migrated my books early. I also published several new paperbacks through KDP Paperback, using their cover creator program.
The publishing process went about as smoothly as it had through CreateSpace. The customer service wasn’t nearly as good, but I had a pretty good idea what I was doing, and with a little experimentation, I was able to produce a quality product.
Or so I thought.
I always order proofs when putting together a paperback, and scrutinize that proof carefully before approving it. For Heart of the Nebula and The Sword Keeper, I had to go through a couple of proofs before I was satisfied that I’d gotten it right. The most common problem was that the front cover would bleed onto the spine. After a couple of failed adjustments on the KDP Paperback cover creator, I decided to just upload the jpg and not futz with it, letting the program adjust it instead. And for a time, that seemed to work.
For the Star Wanderers books, I did the same thing, letting the KDP Paperback cover creator do its thing without futzing with the placement of the front cover image. A couple of the proof copies had the bleeding problem, but after following a couple of online discussions, it seemed that the consensus was that the proof copies were of lesser quality than the actual customer copies.
That should have been a red flag right there, but I went ahead and approved them anyway, since the bleed was only about a millimeter or so, and I couldn’t justify the expense of another eight proof copies.
Big mistake.
A couple of months later, I ordered about $100 worth of author copies to sell at conventions. This was the result:
Every damn book had the cover bleed problem. Every. Damn. Book. And it wasn’t a small print error, either. The bleed was as much as 3 millimeters on some copies.
Keep in mind that except for Genesis Earth, all of these covers were designed through KDP Paperback cover creator. Also keep in mind that aside from a couple of the Star Wanderers books, this printing error was not present in any of the proofs that I approved.
Genesis Earth was particularly troubling, because that was a book that I migrated from CreateSpace. None of the author copies that I’d ordered from CreateSpace ever demonstrated this printing error. In fact, I’d gone through several proofs to ensure that the front cover image was completely outside of the red zone, to ensure that such a bleed problem would never be an issue.
KDP’s customer service promises that they respond to every issue within 24 hours. That is a lie. My first inquiry received no reply—not even the standard copy-paste boilerplate response that they usually send first.
I waited three days and sent a second inquiry, threatening to email Jeff Bezos and pull all of my books if I did not receive a response within 24 hours. As you can probably surmise, I did not get a response within 24 hours.
I did eventually get a response, and ultimately I did get a partial refund for my books. But by then, I’d had enough.
KDP Paperback produces an unacceptably inferior product. Furthermore, their customer service is terrible. Because I cannot asure my readers that they will receive an acceptable quality book, I have decided to pull all of my paperbacks from KDP Paperback and go through someone else.
It may take a few months to figure this out, in which time, my books unfortunately will not be available in print. However, I think that this will be the best solution in the long run. I’ve heard good things about Ingram Spark, so I’ll check them out, but it may take a while to do things properly.
And this time, I’m not going to take any half measures.
