Day: September 25, 2014

Aha! I Am Definitely Older than I Used to Be

Lynn

I crashed early last night, after a long night the night before and too little sleep over the last week. I thought I might be coming down with something. Turns out I’m probably just getting old. :D

Too old for all-nighters anyway. My birthday’s coming up soon, and I’ll have reached the big 4-0. Yikes. I can’t decide whether I want to be amazed or horrified at the prospect that my life is probably half lived at this point. I’d love to imagine living a century but my family history doesn’t support that. I have only one grandparent still living and she just had her eightieth birthday a few months ago. My other grandparents died a very long time ago. I wasn’t out of my twenties when I lost the last of the three. I never even met one of them. My maternal grandfather died when my mother was seven. Cancer.

Cancer got them all, in fact.

I try not to think about it too much, tbh. I would definitely prefer to live to see my kids hit middle age. :D

I’m still exercising daily, and my fatigue issues have been getting a lot better. Spacing my meals out 5 to 6 hours apart and not eating between them has made a huge difference in how I feel.

But there’ll be no more all-nighters for me. Yesterday really brought home to me how hard it is for me to recover after a few nights of too little sleep. I’m just not that person anymore. Going to bed late isn’t a problem; going to bed late when I have to be up at 6 am so I can get back to work to meet a deadline is the problem. And I won’t be doing that anymore.

I’ll just have to plan my life around getting a good night’s sleep every night. ;)

I feel good today. I took a quick break from my read through of my last book to type this out, and now I need to get back to it. I’m sure I’ll be back later. I’ve been in a blogging mood the last few days! :D

Should’ve Given More Thought to Paperback Book Sizes

Lynn

I just found that I’ve sold seven copies of a $19.99 book through the expanded distribution at Createspace and five copies of two $17.99 books this month. I don’t sell a lot of paperbacks in general, and I’m sure my pricing doesn’t help that, but I like expanded distribution, and because of that, I won’t under price my books.

If I had it to do over again, I would have chosen to size my books at 5.5 x 8.5 instead of 5 x 8 so I could cut the price a bit and keep my profit, but I didn’t, and I don’t intend to redo my entire catalog’s paperback formatting any time soon so I’m stuck for the time being.

When I start a new series, though, I will definitely be going for the slightly larger books. It cuts down on pages and makes the books cost less to produce. (I refuse to cut my font size, leading, or margins, which would also cut the number of pages, but that’s a sacrifice I won’t make.)

I chose the smaller size because my first books were quite short. But then I got stuck in that size, because I don’t want different books in the same series to be different sizes. It just doesn’t seem as professional to me to change that mid-series. Of course, maybe it’s silly to worry about that, but I do. I want my books to be pretty! ;)

So here’s my advice for anyone trying to decide on paperback book sizes.

Page count matters. Createspace creates trade sized paperbacks. Don’t try to pretend they’re mass market and go for the smallest size you can, because you’ll still have to charge trade prices and the book will look less valuable as a small book. And if you have a long book, that small book is going to be much too fat to be any more comfortable to hold than a larger book.

But… if your book is short, a small book will help pad the pages. ;) But again… if you do the font right and use an attractive leading and attractive but generous margins, you can accomplish the same thing and have a very professional looking book.

No one likes itty bitty fonts in a print book. Just don’t do it, no matter how tempted you are or how much you swear you like itty bitty fonts best. It’ll make your book shorter, but if you need a shorter book, chose a bigger book.

But the publishers use little bitty fonts, you say. So what? Aren’t there enough people complaining about how publishers have made fonts too small to cut their costs? Why would you want to emulate that?

I’m actually in the middle of formatting my last book for Createspace and yes, I’m stuck formatting it for an 5 x 8 sized book. But hey! I have a very practical reason to keep my books from turning into doorstoppers. :D