Everything worked out for the print edition! Maya, who does my cover designs, came through for me from vacation and tweaked my cover so that both Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) and Ingram Spark accepted it. There will be a trade paperback edition on sale next Tuesday! You can pre-order it right now!
The pricing is a little weird, though. Bear with me on this. I set different prices at Amazon and Ingram, because the profit margins are very different between the two places. At Amazon/KDP, I can make a decent profit on a sale at $20.99 for the print version. (That’s higher than I would like, but print-on-demand publishing is still more expensive than the old way.) At Ingram—which is the company that libraries and most bookstores would order from—I would make almost nothing at that price. So my Ingram price is $22.95. That still gives a pretty thin profit margin, but I can’t see going any higher.
That part’s a little weird, but here’s the really weird part: Amazon doesn’t allow pre-orders of their own version of a paper book, but they do allow pre-orders of the Ingram version! So the pre-order displays at $22.95. On launch day, I plan to release the Amazon version at $20.99—so on launch day or soon after, that price should go down. So you can pre-order today, but I have no idea whether you’ll get the Ingram edition at $22.95 or the KDP edition at $20.99! They should be pretty much the same, though they’ll come from different printing plants.
Anyway, as of now, everything is go for launch!
Edit: I forgot to add, I am planning a hardcover edition, but have had to delay it. I hope to get it up in a couple of weeks, but it’s dependent on when other people are free to help with the technical aspects.
Also, the paperback edition is a trade paperback (i.e., large format), 5.5″ x 8.5″, which is the same size as the planned hardcover.
I need your help! Are you going to be attending an SF con or other similar gathering where it might be helpful to put out some of my promotional freebies (flyers and coasters)? I’d really appreciate it.
![Drum roll, please! The End Times have arrived! The End Times! The End of waiting for me to finish The Reefs of Time. Yes, I have reached the end! The Reefs of Time is substantially DONE. That’s right—I’ve finished the major rewrite of the 268,000 word manuscript! Most of those words, I now believe, are the right words, and in the right order. That works out to about 1326 manuscript pages in Courier New, with two spaces after many periods, and one space after others, because habits die hard. Ten years in the works, this novel has been through the fermenter, the extractor, the refractors, the distillers, the boilers, the oven, and aged in camphor-wood in the cellar. Here’s what the manuscript looks like, with its tired but happy progenitor. [CUE “cheers” and more “cheers,” and maybe a few “huzzahs”!] “But wait!” you say. “Is that some kind of weasel wording, ‘substantially done’? What are you trying to pull here?” Trust me, I’m not trying to pull anything. Over the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up some edits I’ve made notes to myself about, and responding to final suggestions from my stalwart (if annoyingly discerning) writing group. And then off it goes to the editor. The editor will edit, and I’ll do a polish pass over the whole thing as I respond to his editorial suggestions. And after that? Why, you get to read it! At last, at long last!](https://i0.wp.com/www.starrigger.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/JC-Reefs-final-ms-5-19-18-elbow-smile_sm.jpg?resize=500%2C375&ssl=1)
