Category: Tech

Why I don‘t rely on Amazon (Pt XXIII)

(Actually the Pt XIII is probably an underestimate)

My latest book is published in three editions: hardback with a dustcover, paperback, and ebook. None of these editions was produced through KDP, and each has my own imprint (j-views Publishing) and ISBN assigned to me.

Why did I do everything through IngramSpark?

Typically in the past I have used IngramSpark (IS) for print editions, using InDesign as my interior formatter, and a mixture of Illustrator and Photoshop for the covers, using the IS templates to position the design elements correctly. Ebooks were a matter of exporting the InDesign text to DOCX format and then running the file through Vellum, a foolproof way of producing good high-quality ebooks from Word files (even if the formatting choices are a bit limited). EPUBs went to Smashwords for most ebooks (Apple, Kobo, etc.) and KDP for Kindle. A number of reasons for the change:

  1. IS has dropped the price of production for print and ebook editions to zero. It was never that expensive to start with, but zero is a nice round figure. Makes accounting simpler as well.
  2. I upgraded my computer recently, allowing me to use the latest version of InDesign. This allows for much better EPUB export, allowing me to use the same file for all editions, and keep the text in sync (InDesign also includes a conditional text feature, which makes it easy to maintain different editions in one file).
  3. Amazon now want an EPUB as the input to create their Kindle files. Need I say that Amazon’s rendering of EPUB files in Kindle is primitive and lags behind others (Apple, Kobo, etc.). This meant going in with Calibre and doing tweaks galore to the rather over-engineered files from InDesign.

The hardcover was a labour of love – I really didn’t expect to sell that many, but it went on sale on 1 October and it’s had a few buyers. I have set the release date for the ebook to 15 October, and for the paperback to 1 November.

And now…

Here’s how Barnes and Noble show it. All well and good. Correct release dates are being shown. Now let’s look at Amazon (US):

Amazon, on the other hand:

  • seems unable to find the front cover for the hardcover edition
  • the Kindle edition is not linked to the printed editions

But of course, in authorcentral, the story is completely different:

All right, I’ll give them 72 hours to try and get things right. But if B&N, who don’t pretend to be a technology company, can manage it, why can’t Amazon?

But when you look at this sort of thing, you have to question Amazon’s ability to compensate authors with the correct amount for their sales. When the two different parts of Amazon are clearly unable to talk to each other, you have to wonder.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

How big should a book be?

I don’t mean “how many pages?”, but “how tall and wide should a book be?”. One problem that I’ve seen with a lot of books recently, especially self-published books, is that they’re too big to fit comfortably into a pocket or a bag.

Sometimes, this seems to be done in order to reduce the number of pages in a book, and therefore bring down the cost (the people who do this are probably the ones who use as small a typeface as possible in order to save space, and who also take the print right to the edge of the paper).

The printers I use for my books, Ingram Spark, happily have a wide range of trim sizes (the technical term for the page size of a book. Not every kind of paper is available in every size (there’s a choice between white, creme, and now something called “groundwood” which I’ve used for my latest, which has come out really nicely, and most of these sizes are paperback only, a few with hard covers and dust jackets. KDP, Amazon’s self-publishing service, offers a subset of these trim sizes.

Now, the cost to me of a hard cover is twice that of a paperback, even before I’ve paid the setup costs, and by the time I’ve factored in the very hefty discount that retailers demand, there’s really no incentive other than vanity for producing a hardcover for adult titles (but see below with regard to children’s books).

However, since I can choose the trim size, I’ve avoided the almost ubiquitous 6″ x 9″ and 5″ x 8″ options (sorry, since Ingram is an American company, they work in antique units for the most part) format which seems to be common to many books. I also, for the most part, tend to avoid the DIN A series of paper formats (1:1.41 ratio) which are OK for paper sheets, but don’t, IMHO, work for books.

When I started to produce On the Other Side of the Sky (at the top of this page) I decided to make it as close as possible to a “standard” or “classic” paperback size, whatever that might be. So I carefully measured up a Penguin, and designed around that. One thing about Ingram Spark is that they ask for a margin of 36pt (3p or 0.5″) on each side of the text block, so if you make your trim size small, remember to knock 72pt (6p or 1″) off each dimension for the text block.

Even so there are two of my titles where I felt that it was a good idea to make a minibook: Unknown Quantities, and my two Untime stories bound together in one volume:

And the reaction has been really positive. The people who have seen and handled the two above seem to love the small size – “a book you can take with you”. And for On the Other Side of the Sky, those who have seen advance copies have said about the paperback that it is a “real book, isn’t it? I can read it in bed”. Perhaps slightly insulting to an author who took many months to produce it, but flattering to the designer who took the words and set them in print. Very gratifying to have these decisions endorsed by readers.

But sometimes it’s a good idea to go slightly odd. For the hardcover of the anthology of our Sherlock Ferret series (hardcover comes into its own for children’s titles (the purchaser the reader is not always the reader and children’s books get a lot of wear and tear), I decided that a square page format would be eye-catching and practical, given Andy’s wonderful illustrations which need to be shown off to their best advantage, rather than being tucked away in a corner.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

New gadget – Kobo Elipsa

I’ve been looking for some time at the reMarkable tablet – a sort of note-taking device. However, there are two or three things about it which did not attract me to it, despite the rave reviews and the attractive appearance of the thing.

  • It’s basically a one-trick pony – you can write and sketch on it – and to a certain extent you can read ebooks on it, but it’s not an ebook reader
  • The synchronisation between gadget and computer seems to be rather clumsy
  • Price: this is not a cheap option

I’ve owned a Kobo of one kind or another for some time now (I think this that I’m describing here is my fourth – the first broke about 10 years ago and was replaced free of charge by Rakuten, and then I bought another one five years ago for my wife so she could download books in Japanese here in the UK, but she didn’t like it, so I took it over to replace my aged one whose non-replaceable battery was dying.

So when Kobo introduced a larger ebook reader with the ability to accept handwriting and diagrams, etc., as well as the ability to read and mark up PDFs, I decided to splash out. The cost (£350) includes pen and smart cover, which is considerably less than the reMarkable’s price.

What you get in the box

The stylus is proprietary – you can’t use anything else. Happily, the stylus, which uses an AAAA battery (first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing) is nicely made, and the cover comes with a clip to hold it firmly. It’s pressure-sensitive, and you can use it as a brush, ballpoint, fountain, or calligraphic pen, with five (not fifty) shades of grey. There is also a highlighter and erase button on the barrel of the stylus.

And, when you come to use handwriting in the advanced notebook, you can convert handwriting to text with a double-tap of your finger.

Even works with diagrams and equations:

Far from perfect, but ok for a few seconds’ work.

Export over USB or Dropbox as an image, HTML, or Word docx.

And for PDFs, it’s great. You can’t type comments, but you can scribble and handwrite (no conversion there as yet, but I expect it to come). Sync via a dedicated Dropbox folder. I’ve used this for proofing and editing already. It’s one of the reasons I bought this thing, and I’m happy that it does what it says on the tin, very effectively. Sync over USB or WiFi through Dropbox.

There’s a link to Pocket, which allows you to read longer Web articles offline. I’ve used that quite a bit already (there is also a very rudimentary Web browser, which I haven’t used. Also a few games, which I’ve looked at.

The thing goes to sleep after a time or when you put the cover on, and you can add a PIN to prevent others from looking at your work – I intend using this for meeting agendas and so on, as well as editing other people’s work, so even this elementary security is useful.

As an ebook reader, it’s great. The size of the page allows a decent amount of text per page, at a reasonable size for reading (as with all Kobos, you can load your own fonts via USB connection. And you can scribble over the page, drag to make a highlight from which you can add a note – and you can browse through all your annotations, listed with a preview. It’s about as heavy and bulky as a thin hardback book. You can read in bed with it, or sit in a chair and read comfortably. Built-in light, and a dark mode, which makes the text white on black. Haven’t used that yet. Press and hold a word for a dictionary definition.

WiFi is fast and reliable in my experience. Syncing is sometimes done for you, as when an edited PDF is closed, sending the edited file to Dropbox, where it can be read, with annotations, on a computer. There were a few freezes when I first got the thing, but there’s been a software update since I bought it, and I expect there to be more, adding features that I think are missing right now. Purchasing off the Kobo store, and moving books to and from the cloud (either Kobo, or Dropbox for non-Kobo ebooks is simple).

Well worth the experiment, IMHO. Already it’s been used for real live work and will continue to be used.

Oh, and one more thing. I’m not enriching Jeff Bezos with this thing.

Add questions as comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

A few points on punctuation, etc.

I recently read Cold Comfort Farm for the first time, and was brought up short by the publisher’s note on typography and orthography, particularly the use of -ize as opposed to -ise as a word ending.

Continue reading “A few points on punctuation, etc.” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Life in Japan can be strange at times

I’m reprinting my Tokyo thriller, At the Sharpe End (it’s available as an ebook already). Strangely, my first two books (Beneath Gray Skies is the other) are the last ones that I have republished in print, following the demise of Inknbeans Press.

The book is about technocrime, fintech, and spies and agents insinuating their way into the lives of a very ordinary British expat scratching a living in Tokyo. It’s a little far-fetched in places, but there are some rather interesting predictions and coincidences in there.

However, looking through the text to reprint it, I’m still quite pleased with the adventures of the eponymous hero, Kenneth Sharpe. Tokyo is a strange place to live, and strange things do happen to those who choose to live and work there. I’m not saying that the exact interactions and events that happened to Sharpe also happened to me, but strange and bizarre things have happened in the past.

Continue reading “Life in Japan can be strange at times” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

New toy time…

Just treated myself to a decent keyboard (piano-type, not QWERTY). In Japan, I bought a Kurzweil MIDIboard, a heavyweight monster of a thing which was a beast to program and lovely to play (polyphonic aftertouch, anyone? Great with the Arturia CS-80). It lasted me for over 20 years, and when I came to leave Japan, it was still working well, and I had no wish to throw it away. It ended up with Morgan Fisher, former keyboard player with Mott the Hoople, who took it off my hands.

kurzweil_midiboard_1.jpg

It was great to hear him play the opening to “All the Way from Memphis” using this as one of his test pieces when he was deciding whether to buy it off me or not.

But that left me with no keyboard when I came to England. I’ve been using a CME Xkey 37 – another poly aftertouch beast, but the action is very limiting, and I wanted to play some piano – 3 octaves are not enough.

cme-xkey37-2083697.jpg

So I looked around, and found what looked like a great deal – a Fatar keybed allied to a decent piano, with a tonewheel organ emulator (with drawbars!), and a subtractive synth – and some fairly sophisticated MIDI facilties.

It has only just made it into the mass market, after production difficulties, it would appear, and my Studiologic Numa Compact 2X made it here this morning. So far, so good, though I have already uncovered a few wrinkles, but no dealbreakers.

Soon I’ll be uploading something to Soundcloud to tell you all what it sounds like.In the meantime, this is what it looks like – and it really is compact (and lightweight at 7kg).

numa-compact2x

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Starting all over again…

I don’t consider myself to be a complete idiot when it comes to computers, but HTML and Web sites drive me up the wall, even with products like Adobe’s Muse (now, sadly, RIP) and the like. So I’ve bitten the bullet and signed up for a paid WordPress site to replace whatever went before. At the moment it is obviously a WordPress site, but it will eventually (in a day or so if I’m lucky) have its own domain.

KickMe

It’s taking me a little longer to get it going than I thought it would, but slowly but surely I am getting there. Eventually, I hope to be able to add all kinds of wonderful things, but for now, only the Sherlock Ferret books are being featured. More will appear soon, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and I only have 10 fingers.

Even though WordPress is much easier to use than it ever was, and most templates are responsive, meaning there are still problems with different browsers, HTML is far from a true WYSIWIG solution.

Which is why, I suppose, I still prefer books. But then, all new technology has its problems.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton