Dragon Lake Books

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self-publishing

Fostering a growth mindset

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Photobox with words: Growth Mindset

I joined The Alliance of Independent Authors last month. I’ve been considering doing so for a while and finally took the plunge once I felt I was almost ready to print my next book.

Alli has been a fantastic resource for me already with plenty of useful and helpful articles freely available on their selfpublishingadvice.org website.

This article popped up on my Facebook feed today: The Psychology of Success For Authors: Do You Secretly Think Self-Publishing is Second Best? by Orna Ross.

While touching on the question of whether traditional publishing or self-publishing is the best route for authors, the article highlights the importance of having a growth mindset and willingness to learn which I feel are essential in any career.

“A growth mindset is the belief that with sincere creative intention, and enough creative attention, we can develop the abilities, skills, and resources we need to attain our goals.”

All of us are capable of developing a growth mindset. Even if we already have one, we can still learn more, still expand our skills. This is part of the reason I’m publishing my next book: Double Your Salary, to motivate you to believe you can achieve more.

What do you think of Orna’s article?

A box of books!

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Does a print run count as a first edition when your novel’s been on sale through Print On Demand for the past three years? Probably not.

I received my first proper print run of The Great Scottish Land Grab today – 100 paperback copies. Quite exciting!

I’ve already got some orders, so will be posting them off immediately and will need to crack on, contacting more book shops to see if they will be willing to stock Land Grab.

I only ordered a small quantity of books for both Land Grab and Fallen Warriors. Having heard horror stories from other authors who ordered thousands of copies only to be unable to sell them, I’ve played it safe. I would rather sell these and have to re-order than worry about storage.

If you would like a paperback edition of The Great Scottish Land Grab you can order through your local bookshop quoting ISBN: 978-0-9929883-7-1

If you would like to buy a signed copy, I’ll be joining Wendy H Jones and Caroline Johnston at Cumbernauld Library on the 16th September from 2pm.

A professional barcode for your book

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In yesterday’s post I mentioned that I was unsure whether to just leave an old email address in the manuscript when ordering a new print run of The Great Scottish Land Grab. I called the printer today and they advised they could also send a PDF proof which has prevented any delay, otherwise I was potentially looking at a full week to order a new proof copy.

I’d pretty much decided that I needed to change the email address, so this morning I did that, corrected another issue I found in the manuscript and then had a last look at the cover. I wasn’t happy with the back page.

I’ve created my own bar code and it dominates the initial draft. I’d also decided to add my author photo as I’ve seen that done and it just didn’t line up in any way with the text or barcode.

So, I had another look at some traditionally published books and decided to have a go at creating my own publisher barcode.

I added my website URL, put on the website of the graphic designer who designed the book cover the first time round and also credited my wife for her photo of me. Set it all up so everything lined up, shrunk down the barcode to a more reasonable size and the finished version is below.

I really like it. Hopefully a much more professional look to the back page. What do you think?

A print ready PDF

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When you want to get a physical copy of your book printed there are a number of terms to get your head round: CMYK, spine width, bleed, gutter size, embedded fonts, print ready PDF…

Printers ask for files in certain formats to ensure that what they end up printing is exactly what you wanted.

I’ve avoided this last one for book interiors until today, but decided to do a little digging and find out more.

In case you’re wondering…

CMYK stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black – the colours traditionally used by printers to produce full colour images. Most screen images will be RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and if you send an RGB image to a printer, you might not get a physical image that looks like you expected. Fortunately most image editing software allows you to set the image as either RGB or CMYK and you should always use CMYK for images that are going to be printed.

Spine width won’t require you to visit your doctor – this is the width of your book and you need to know this if producing your own book cover as it will change if you add or remove pages. If you want the book title to be centred on the spine, you need to calculate the spine width when working out the size of your cover image.

Bleed – starting to sound like a murder/mystery right here! Bleed is also related to cover images. Once your book is printed and bound, it will be trimmed to a nice and neat edge. Your image should extend past the Bleed area of the cover (between 3 and 5 mm from each edge – including the spine!) so that if the trim is less than expected, there is no unexpected white space at the edge.

Gutter size. Nope, nothing to do with the amount of water your drains can take advantge of, gutter size is an extra buffer on the spine edge of each page that ensures that the reader can see the whole page easily. Some printers don’t require this, but others do. It is important to check as otherwise your text may look offset on the page.

Embedded Fonts and print ready PDF. I’ve not previously had to worry about this as I used Amazon Createspace to produce Print On Demand (POD) physical copies of The Great Scottish Land Grab, and was able to send them a word document for the book’s interior. (The cover image was designed for me) For my first run of Fallen Warriors I used Book Printing UK who also accepted word documents for the interior.

Ordering my first batch of 100 copies of The Great Scottish Land Grab from Book Printing UK, I hesitated when I saw they initially ask for print ready PDF files.

I use Microsoft Word 10 on a Windows 10 OS and while I frequently use Word to export documents as PDF, I wasn’t sure whether it could produce a “print ready” PDF.

As I wrote above, I decided to do some digging and quickly found this helpful guide: http://www.bookprinting.co.uk/helpinghand.html. At the bottom of the page there is a helpful section: How to create print ready PDF files in Microsoft Word.

Turns out it is fairly simple, ensuring that Options are set to save as ISO 190051 compliant (PDF/A)

And the best thing about it, Book Printing UK gave me a small discount when I ordered my next batch of books as they didn’t have to spend time converting the interior to PDF!

Self-publishing your own books does take time and has a learning curve, but if you’re willing to learn and have the time, it is very rewarding.

Fallen Warriors is now available in paperback format!

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Three boxes arrived today, delivered by a friendly UPS guy. Each containing bundles of carefully wrapped paperback copies of Fallen Warriors!

I’ve been checking online daily, sometimes several times a day, waiting for them to arrive.

It’s been a long road, first getting the ebook version released and then going through another round of formatting and proofing copies – almost four months since the ebook was published till the physical copies arrived.

I’m going to be primarily promoting the paperback edition to bookshops, but if you want to buy a copy directly from me, you can use the contact form to get in touch.

The retail price is £9.99. If you want to order from your bookshop, quote them this ISBN: 978-0-9929883-8-8

My first bookshop orders

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Ever since I’ve wanted to be a writer, I’ve wanted to see my books for sale in book shops. When I self-published The Great Scottish Land Grab I ran out of money and opted to release it as a physical book through Print On Demand (POD). The main problem with that was the price per unit was way too high to allow me to sell to book shops.

With Fallen Warriors I’ve ordered 100 paperback copies at a price that’s low enough I can make a small profit on each sale, including the book shops discount and postage. I’m not going to get rich from selling physical copies, but it allows me to reach a wider readership than I would otherwise.

I’ve offered Fallen Warriors to three bookshops now and two have so far said they’ll take copies with the other taking a proof copy to review. One of those bookshops – The Shetland Times Bookshop in Lerwick, Shetland – took one copy each of Fallen Warriors and The Great Scottish Land Grab last week when I was up in Shetland so if you want to buy the first paperback copy of Fallen Warriors on sale anywhere, or a copy of The Great Scottish Land Grab, you can do so in Lerwick! And they’ve even ordered more copies of The Great Scottish Land Grab so I now need to urgently order copies to send them. It’s all quite exciting!