Getting your novel ready to be printed as a paperback book is a challenge – much more so than publishing an eBook. Formatting is more involved as the template has to fit to certain specifications, but several companies (including CreateSpace and Book Printing UK) offer templates you can start with. (I have to say, CreateSpace offer an excellent range of templates!)
Some in the indie-author community simply won’t bother with having a printed copy made available, but the markets I’m aiming for with both The Great Scottish Land Grab and Fallen Warriors still has a lot of readers who prefer physical books and I would lose out on a lot of sales if I don’t provide a physical version.
So, I’ve been working with Book Printing UK over the past three months to get 100 copies of Fallen Warriors into print.
It’s taken so long as I’ve been fitting the work around my full-time job, my family, and initial attempts at marketing the eBook version of Fallen Warriors.
I had two initial proof copies printed up, one with a gloss cover and the other with a matt cover to see which worked best.
The matt cover looks a lot better, but unfortunately the initial printing of the matt cover was blurry (the gloss was sharp) and also, despite having had several proof-reads, I found some additional typos inside that I decided had to be fixed. Myself and a friend re-read the whole book (I went backwards, a page at a time!) and found some more missing commas etc. so I’ll be updating the eBook version soon as well.
I was expecting the final proof yesterday, but only received a card through the door from our Postie…
Guess I’ll be getting up early tomorrow…