All Romance Ebooks is closing, and despite losing money I’m owed, I’m not that sad about it

As a general rule, I prefer to not spend a lot of my time letting negative thoughts go round and round in my head, mostly because I tend toward obsession and I don’t want to obsess over negative thoughts!

So here are some not so negative things about the All Romance Ebooks closing.

I’m going to shave anywhere from 1 to 3 hours off my total publishing time for every book I publish.

  • 5 to 10 minutes to make a wider cover (1:1.5 vs. 1:1.6) that I have to shrink to 200 x 300
  • 30 to 60 minutes formatting a copy of my master book file for PDF
  • 5 minutes to generate a custom sized cover image for the PDF file (because I always forget to export this image when I’m exporting my usual sizes)
  • 10 to 20 minutes importing my EPUB from Jutoh into Calibre, making some tweaks, and exporting as a MOBI
  • 30 minutes actually publishing the files to ARe

If there are issues, or I get caught up in what I’m doing, all these things can take longer. :)

And now I don’t have to do any of those things!

I need only EPUB files and my Word file for everywhere else. Smashwords uses doc files instead of docx, but I use the same file, make a quick save as doc, add one line to note it’s the Smashwords edition, and save again. I do nothing else to my file for Smashwords.

So getting rid of ARe is a real boon to my process.

One more vendor who pays only quarterly is gone.

I hate having to deal with payments like that in my sales spreadsheet, because it’s monthly, and ARe is always off by pennies and I have to make adjustments that annoy me because they aren’t right.

My cover design process just got easier!

I don’t have to worry about making my covers wide enough for the 1:1.5 200 x 300 covers I needed for ARe.

I’ve been designing my covers to the 1:1.6 ratio from the beginning and I like them. That size looks best to me on all my differently sized reading devices and apps, but I always had to make the 1:1.5 covers for ARe because I couldn’t stand stretching the covers and making them look misshapen.

In fact, I’m thinking about using this opportunity to revisit my cover template.

I’m pretty happy about all these things, to be honest. :)