Books!

I completed my book goal for 2018, and now I have to do the work of getting all the links for all my books in one place. Though I still haven't put the latest books on wide release through Smashwords or Draft to Digital. Still, last week I did some vanity shots of my Hike with Me books. I can hardly believe that I'm up to 8.

8 Hike with Me books - mostly proof copies. 

I've got my first one, Stump Lake, with the original cover. I started with the cover creator provided by CreateSpace with that one, and added my own picture. The next year, I wanted to give the books their own particular style. The second in the pile there has a light green strip next to the cover picture because I was trying to just have the spine be dark green. But the spine just wouldn't line up, no matter what I did. So I changed the design to what I've kept for the rest of them. One picture on front, one or two on the back.

I really like these books that I've created. I can see how I've grown in both writing and photography by looking back at these. Having them to create gives me motivation to write more consistently, even if I'm not doing the fiction I still want to do.

Sometimes I think about whether I should have tried to sell this project to a publisher. I like where I've landed with the design of both the exterior and interior, but the costs per unit would be smaller for a publisher that could afford to order in bulk, bringing the overall price into a more reasonable range. I price the paperbacks as low as I can, and that means skipping out on expanded distribution, which would allow my book to be found and purchased by libraries and book stores. That's probably the thing that bugs me most, is that I can't price them to sell - not if I want to stick with full color.

One year, I did an experiment and made a normal print size edition to sell in addition to the large print. The price difference was $10; I should probably do more of those, though the back end setup of Kindle Direct Publishing isn't really designed to have multiple editions like that. It has a one-to-one relationship between each ebook and paperback.

I finally got around to updating the secondary pages on the my blogs to display an up to date reckoning of where my books can be purchased. Next, I've got to set up last year's books to expanded ebook distribution.