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!
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.
It’s September, my favorite month of the year! Maybe I’ll revisit that post in a blast from the past or something. So many reasons why September is awesome.
Things are going well on the writing front. I’ve switched up my daily routine to make more writing time, and it’s working well so far. My alarm goes off at 5:45 am (just after oh-dark-thirty) and I write for about an hour before heading off to my part time job. I’ve found that I tend to write a lot more when I start first thing in the day, so the earlier I can start, the better.
I won’t bore you with the rest of my routine, unless you want me to write a post about it. There’s a bunch of interesting lifestyle tweaks I’ve been trying out, like reading a couple chapters from one of the books I’m reading as soon as I get back from work in the afternoon, in order to refill the creative well and not get caught in a Youtube / general internet trap. Stuff like that.
My current WIP is A Queen in Hiding (Sons of the Starfarers, Book 7) which is proving to be a surprisingly difficult book. It’s definitely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever written, and that’s saying a lot. In Captives in Obscurity, Reva and Isaac get assimilated into a hive mind, and things only get crazier from there.
Sometimes, stories come really easy, almost like they spring fully formed from the mind. Other times, I’ve found I have to throw out almost the entire first draft before I discover the story.
The weird thing is that it has nothing to do with actual book length. Stars of Blood and Glory and Outworlder are totally different lengths, but they both came out almost perfect in the first draft. However, almost all of the Star Wanderers novellas took multiple drafts filled with stuff that had to be cut. Heart of the Nebula took years to finish, and I had to throw out multiple characters and subplots. I struggled for a long time with Genesis Earth, until I decided to throw the whole thing out and start with a blank page. The book was finished less than four weeks later.
The holy grail, of course, is to write a perfect book in four to six weeks (or less!) every time I set off to start a new one. But as awesome as it would be to barf rainbows and poop gold, all of those things sadly remain out of reach.
My goal at this point is to publish the last four Sons of the Starfarers books in 2018, two months apart from each other. Ideally, I’d like to have the next one up for preorder in time for the previous one’s release. It’s going to take some coordination, but I already have all the covers, which leaves just the writing and editing (metadata and formatting doesn’t take more than a day).
Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen unless I can get A Queen in Hiding ready to go by December. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
Gunslinger to the Galaxy is on hold for now, though so far it’s coming along very nicely. I should be able to pick it up and finish without too much trouble. Edenfall is also on hold, for how much longer I really don’t know. Before the end of 2018, I’d like to publish either the one or the other, but publishing them both is probably a bit of a stretch.
Also, I haven’t even started The Sword Bearer yet (second book in the Twelfth Sword Trilogy), though I have lots of great ideas for it. Since The Sword Keeper is coming out in just a couple weeks, I should probably get on that.
On the publishing side, I dropped the ball a bit in August. It took so much energy to get The Sword Keeper ready for publication that I totally spaced publishing anything. I do have a bunch of shorts that are nearing the end of the submissions gauntlet, and some bundles that can go up too.
I don’t sell many print books, but I want to get print versions of all of my books up, including short stories. That’s going to be an ongoing project for a while. I also want to put up audiobook versions eventually, but it’s going to take some time to get that ball rolling. However, it has moved up the priority list.
That’s pretty much it. So much stuff I want to do, so little time to do it. Time, money, or youth: you can only pick two (and one of them isn’t your choice).
Hey guys, just thought you might like to know that I’m running a couple of Goodreads giveaways this month! They are for two copies of Bringing Stella Home, and one set of the first four Star Wanderers books. Check it out!
In addition, I’m currently working on typesetting and formatting the print versions of Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles (Omnibus I-IV) and Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII). If all goes well, those should be up for sale by the end of the month.
That just about does it for now. Thanks for reading!
For those of you who are reading the Sons of the Starfarers series, I have a few updates and points of business that I think you may be interested in.
First, Sons of the Starfarers: Omnibus I-III is now up for pre-order on most of the ebook sites. It will go live on November 1st, but the print edition should be available on Amazon and CreateSpace about two weeks before that. All I have left to do for the print edition is the typesetting, but that takes a lot of time, so I’m shooting for October 15th to have the print edition ready.
Now, here’s the interesting part. Amazon has a program called MatchBook where people who buy the print edition can get the ebook edition for cheap or free. For the omnibus edition, I’ve set the discount ebook price for $.99, which means that if you buy the print edition, you can get the ebook for just $.99 extra.
The big question is how this applies to pre-orders. If you pre-order the ebook and buy the print edition before the ebook comes out, will Amazon charge you the full $5.99 or the $.99? I don’t know yet, but I plan to ask an Amazon representative to clarify. Because if ordering the print version while the ebook is still on pre-order means that you get the ebook at the discount MatchBook price, I will do everything I can to get the print version out in time so you can do that.
For links to the omnibus, keep an eye on the front page: I haven’t added it to my blog yet, but I plan to do that shortly. Or you can just go over to your favorite ebookstore and search for “sons of the starfarers omnibus.”
Finally, I’ve decided to drop the price for Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers: Book I) from $2.99 to $0 and make it permanently free. The trick now is getting Amazon to price match with the other retailers, since you can’t technically set the price of an Amazon book to $0 (you have to mark it down on a competitor and let them know). So if you have a few moments to help, I would appreciate it! Just follow these steps:
Go to the Amazon page for Brothers in Exile and look for the link that says “tell us about a lower price.”
When you click the link, it should bring up a submenu that asks you where you saw the lower price. Click on “website.”
Where it asks for the URL, copy and past either the link to iBooks, the link to Nook, or the link to Kobo (or all three!).
Where it asks for the competitor’s price, enter “0” and click “submit feedback.”
That’s it! If you could take a few moments to do that, I would greatly appreciate it. And if you haven’t read Brothers in Exile yet, here’s a great way to get it for free!
For those of you waiting for Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV), I’m happy to say that progress is coming along very, very well with that one. I hope to have it up for pre-order before the end of October, and the tentative release date will be January 3rd. It’s going to be a bit of a crunch to get it all done in time, but I’m really eager to write this story and I think I can get the first draft done in the next couple of weeks.
This is what my current writing space looks like. It’s hard to see, but there’s a board taped to the wall with the label “Publishing To Do.” Even though that board is right next to me whenever I’m working on stuff, I hardly ever look at it, and the tasks just keep piling up. So to put a little pressure on myself to get them done, I thought I’d list them here.
For those of you who are just curious, consider this a look behind the curtain of a working self-published writer.
Publish Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) — I actually haven’t bothered to write this one down, but since it’s the top priority task, it’s the one most likely to get done. Everything is finished except the book cover, and I’m finalizing that with the designer right now.
POD Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) — “POD” means “print-on-demand.” All the other Star Wanderers books are out in print now, except for this one. Coming soon!
Figure out how to format PDFs for DriveThru Fiction — I hear that customers at DriveThru Fiction like to buy PDFs that they can print out and bind as books themselves. I have no idea how to format that sort of thing, so I need to find out from someone more knowledgeable than me and figure out how to do that. For all of my books. Blargh.
Upload books to ARe/Omnilit
Upload books to Xinxii
Upload books to Google Play — The main reason I haven’t uploaded my books to these sites is because I’m going to be getting new covers for all the Star Wanderers books soon. Why do something twice if you only have to do it once? But yeah, I should probably just take a day or two and upload all the current versions anyway.
Update Amazon Book Descriptions via Author Central — This is made complicated by the fact that there are separate Author Central pages for each Amazon store. AARGH.
Figure out Amazon Affiliate Program — I am probably leaving a fair amount of money on the table by not putting those affiliate tags on each of my Amazon links, so yeah, better get on that.
Donate books to the Provo Library — I’m not sure if they’ll take them, though. My roommate says they won’t, but my brother-in-law’s father works there, so maybe he can help me find a connection.
Donate books to the HBLL — Since I’m a BYU alum, I’m pretty sure I can convince them to take my books. I’ve seen other self-published stuff in there.
POD Star Wanderers Omnibuses — Since I need to get new covers for all the individual ones first, this one falls kind of low on the list.
Figure out distribution on Xinxii — I heard from somewhere that they do free ISBNs now. Then again, that might have been a holiday deal. Either way, it’s something to look into–after I upload all my books there, of course.
Fill out Smashwords interview — This will probably be the funnest thing to do on this list.
Add books to Find Read Love — As well as any other book sites that are awesome.
Get active on Goodreads — If there’s any social media site that isn’t a waste of time, it’s probably Goodreads. I should try to be a more active user of that site, not just as a writer but as a reader. For starters, I should transfer all of the stuff from my book review section and join some groups that look particularly interesting. I’m already a member of Sword & Laser, but I haven’t done anything more than introduce myself on the forums. I listen to their podcast, though, and really love it.
That’s the list, more or less. I would absolutely love it if I had an assistant who could take care of this stuff, but I’m not currently making enough to hire one, and it would just be weird to take on an intern. Besides, the main reason I haven’t done any of this stuff yet is because I’m lazy. If I did a bit here and there, I could probably knock it all out in a couple of months. Maybe if I made a new personal rule to do something from this list before logging on to Steam? Hmm … that might actually work.
In any case, that’s what the publishing side looks like around here. When you’re self-published, you more or less have to do all of this yourself. It can be a chore sometimes, but it still beats writing personalized query letters. 😛
If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been busy publishing a new book! Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII) is now out on Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo as a $2.99 ebook, and should be up on Barnes & Noble and iTunes in a couple of weeks.
This now brings the total number of books I’ve published to 17. Part VIII: Deliverance should be out in early- to mid-November, and if things go well, I should be able to put out at least one more ebook before the end of the year.
My main publishing goal, though, is to get print versions out of every Star Wanderers story before Christmas. I got the first proof of Outworlder a few days ago, and fixed the issues with it over the weekend. Just have to order another proof and make sure it looks good, then it’s just a matter of clicking a couple buttons and it should be up on Amazon. Because it’s a small book, it should sell for between $4 to $6–I know there are a lot of books in this series, so I’ll do what I can to keep the prices low!
Speaking of print editions, the trade paperback of Stars of Blood and Glory is now out on Amazon and the CreateSpace store! If you prefer to read in paper or just want a copy for your bookshelf, you can pick it up now. I’ve gotten some requests for signed copies, so I’m going to order a few from CreateSpace and try to get those sent out in the next few weeks. If you’re interested, shoot me an email at joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll see what I can do.
That’s just about it. So much publishing–when am I going to get a chance to just write? It’s been a lot of fun though, and I’m happy to get these books out to you guys. Next week, I’ll turn my focus back to Sons of the Starfarers and hopefully make some good progress on the first book of that series.
So I just realized it’s been a looong time since I posted anything besides Trope Tuesday posts on this blog. A lot of things have happened, and I’ve got a lot of things I want to blog about, but really all my spare time has been spent happily typesetting for Stars of Blood and Glory and Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I).
I always tell people that if I wasn’t a writer, I’d be a typesetter because I enjoy it so much. I’m not sure if that’s true, because it can get a little mind-numbing after a while, but as an indie writer who only has to do it every now and again, it’s really fun! The best part, of course, is getting to that finished product, a book full of words and paragraphs and chapters that look so beautiful on the page, which you can flip through and say “wow, I wrote that!”
The whole process is great, though, even with the frustrations like computer crashes and formatting struggles. Fortunately, those don’t happen quite as often since I’ve more or less figured out the tools. I use LibreOffice almost exclusively for the interior (yes, I know In Design is awesome but LibreOffice works well too), and The Gimp for the cover art.
Yesterday, I started on the cover art for Stars of Blood and Glory, thinking it would take me a few days to finish it. Well, one thing led to another, and a few hours later I had this:
Not bad. I think I was able to do it so quickly because I followed the same basic pattern as Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars. Once you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t take very long to do it. It also helped to have such great art (shout-out to Hideyoshi)!
So yeah, the only thing I have to do now is order the proofs and approve them. After that, the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory should be up on Amazon in just a couple of days, so keep an eye out for that!
Also, I don’t think Amazon has announced this to the general public yet, but this Christmas they’re starting a program where you can get the ebook edition of a participating book bundled with the print edition of the book for an extra $2.99 or less. It’s called Matchbook, and I’m happy to announce that all of my novels will be in the program! They’ll be priced at either $1.99 or $.99, so if you’re looking for a Christmas gift, you can buy one of my print books and get the ebook for yourself for more than 50% of the price. The Star Wanderers books, when I have the print versions up (and I’m working on that now), will bundle the ebooks for free!
So yeah, that’s what’s been taking away from my blogging time. Salt Lake Comic Con was also pretty cool–it was my first Comic Con experience, so I should probably blog about that too. Also, some book reviews, some stuff that exploded on the internet recently that I want to react to … yeah, I’ve fallen a bit behind.
But above and beyond all this blogging / typesetting / publishing stuff, writing is still my #1 priority. I started the first Sons of the Starfarers novella just last week, and have been working on it a little every day since. I’m way excited about this next project–it’s going to be amazing! Like a spinoff of Star Wanderers, but sooo much more. But I’ll wait until tuesday to talk about that.
In the meantime, keep an eye out for the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory! It should be out in the next week or so. And as for Star Wanderers, the print editions should be coming out this month or next, depending on how effectively (or not) I can manage this typesetting addiction.
Hey guys, this is just going to be a quick update since it’s midnight here on the east coast and I’m pretty tired from the three-day train ride. Sleeping on the train is like skipping stones, where all you’re really doing is seeing how far you can go before you crash (and I’m due for a crash). So anyways, here goes.
First, I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done on the train, partially because of the sleep issue but mostly because I started reading STRAY by Andrea K. Höst and holy crap, I could not put it down. Seriously. It got to the point where the only thing I wanted to do was read this book, which was fortunate because riding the train, there’s not much else to do anyway. So I finished it in a little over 24 hours, which means you can expect to see a review here soon, either before or after I get back from vacation (probably before, because I plan to read the next couple books in the series at the beach and on the ride back).
Second, I’ve decided to spend the next week or so working exclusively on Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII), while the feedback is still fresh and my enthusiasm is still strong. Also, after burning through the first chapter in the last couple days, I think I can get this done pretty fast. After that, I’ll send it out to a couple of other first readers, probably make another pass, then figure things out from there. If all goes well, it should be out by mid-September-ish.
Third, I’m thinking about releasing print editions of the Star Wanderers series. At first, I thought I’d limit the print editions to the omnibuses (omnibi?), but now I think it would be cool to do little pocket-sized editions of each novella. What do you guys think? If there’s demand, I’ll try to put them out a little sooner, hopefully before Christmas. And since they’re small, I can probably price them lower, like around $6 to $7 or so (and of course, Amazon will discount them).
Third point one, before I do that I need to release a print version of Stars of Blood and Glory. Which shouldn’t be too difficult, since I’ve already typeset about half of it. Mostly I’ve just been lazy and/or busy with other stuff, but now that I check CreateSpace it seems that people are actually buying my print books, hmm. Better get on top of that.
Fourth … actually, there is no fourth. I guess I should say I’m on vacation, which means doing what I usually do except from Cape Cod, spending my non-writing time doing fun things with family. But since I’m home, I plan to go through my high-school / middle-school papers and hunt down my first novel attempt, if for no other reason than to destroy it. I may keep a page or two as a curiosity/souvenir, but that abomination really needs to die.
And that’s about it. The stone has begun to sink, and I really need to hit the sack.
I’m working on Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) right now, and it’s coming along swimmingly. Where the other novellas are pretty much character dramas in a space opera setting, this one is more space adventure with the character / relationship stuff under the surface. It’s all about Mariya and Lucca, how they meet and end up falling for each other in some very extreme circumstances. I think they crash-land on Zarmina in chapter 3, and things just get crazier from there. Today, I wrote a scene with some giant reptilian bird-monsters, and I think I pounded out 1,000 words in 20 minutes.
So yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with that. The next one I’m going to publish, though, is Benefactor (Part VI), and I still have to do a lot of revisions on that one. So it probably won’t be out until next month sometime, probably closer to August–I want to make sure it’s as good as I can make it. But since the first draft of Reproach (Part VII) is already finished, it (hopefully) shouldn’t be much longer than that for it to come out, maybe in August. And Deliverance should come out soon after that.
For now, my goal is to finish Deliverance this week, and start the revisions for Benefactor immediately after that. It would be awesome to get these books out in July > August > September, though it might be more like July > September > October. Definitely, I’ll have Part VIII out before the holidays, perhaps even Part IX or X as well.
In the meantime, I just started typesetting the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory and set Desert Stars and Genesis Earth for expanded distribution through CreateSpace. There’s been some interesting developments in print-on-demand in the past few months, which may make it possible to get my books in bookstores through that venue. I still need to do some research on that end, but I do want to get the print versions out there at least. My first priority, though, is definitely writing.
There’s been a great deal of interest in my Star Wanderers ebooks, not at blockbuster levels but certainly more than I was expecting. And it’s growing, too–June is already my best month ever sales-wise, and most of the reviews have been quite positive. If the momentum keeps up with the next few books in the series, I might (might!) be able to go full-time before the end of the year. Worldcon 2013 is definitely looking like a possibility, and if I can find some friends to room and/or drive down with, chances are good that I’ll be going.
So yeah, thanks for all your support and interest! This has been my dream for a long, long time, so it’s really gratifying to see it finally within my grasp. I definitely don’t take it for granted, so I will do all I can to write more and better stories for you guys. My goal is to write more than a hundred novels & novellas, and I’m already on track to do so!
I’ll leave you with this video from Georgia, which I still miss almost every day. Man, I need to find another place that I can fall in love with as much as I did with that country. A small part of me wants to say “screw it all” and go back … in any case, here’s the video:
