I prefer to write books—not just words

For much of the 20th Century, writers composed their masterpieces on 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper. Later they used word processing software that emulated the same shape on a PC monitor.

Also traditionally, most authors have a specific word-count in mind, such as 70,000 words, as they write their books.

But when I'm working on a book that I will be publishing, I usually have a specific page-count and price in mind, such as 300 pages/$15.95.

And rather than just spray words onto my monitor, I set up MS Word for the actual page size of my book (such as 6 x 9 inches for a paperback) and correct margins and start writing a book.

(from my Stories I'd Tell My Children (but maybe not until they're adults)

By viewing actual pages, it's much easier to judge my progress, and to know if chapters should be chopped or stretched or shifted.

I always insert a temporary left-hand "page zero" ahead of the real right-hand "page one" so I can view pages as realistic two-page spreads, instead of onesies, or with left-right-reversals.

This is not very important if a book is all-text, but if you have photos or illustrations or tables, it's important to view the spreads as your readers will see them, to avoid graphic disasters.

Viewing two-page spreads on a modern wide-screen monitor makes it easy to judge when illustrations should be enlarged, reduced or moved around; and to eliminate widows and orphans, and to see if a chapter needs to be trimmed to end at the bottom of a page.

Kill the widows and orphans

In the "normal" world, widows and orphans are often lonely people and deserve compassion and support. Blue-chip and utility stocks were called "widow & orphan" investments because they could be relied on to pay dividends year after year—and maybe grow in value.

In typography, widows and orphans are lonely bits of text that do not deserve compassion. They are ugly, distracting and should be KILLED.

A widow is a single word or short line at the end of a paragraph that appears at the top of a page or column. The text sample below has a widow. It was easily fixed by condensing the text in the last part of the previous page.

An orphan  is a single word or short line at the end of a paragraph, or a tiny beginning of a paragraph at the bottom of a page or column. The text sample below has an orphan, ironically with the word "books." It was easily fixed by changing "did give" to "gave" in the last sentence.

With modern word-processing software it's easy to kill the offensive bits of text. You can condense the space between words, eliminate a word or two, or maybe replace a long word with a shorter alternative, such as "needed" for "necessary." Sometimes just eliminating one letter will fix your design.

Buying and giving copies of your own book

Every author needs to have copies of her or his own book, to distribute to potential reviewers, to give to family and friends, to keep around the house—or maybe even to sell.

Most of my recent p-books have been printed and distributed by Amazon ("KDP").

While working on a new book, I make many revisions. I make most of the changes while viewing the books on my PC screen, but I also like to get physical copies to carry around and mark up for fixing.

I can order a "proof copy" of my latest masterpiece for $6.05, plus $3.59 for shipping, with delivery in about ten days.

Alternatively, I can place a regular order from Amazon. The price is $15.95 plus $1.01 for sales tax, and I get next-day delivery. (The books are printed a few miles from my home in Connecticut.) I'll earn a royalty on each of the books that are sold to me, lowering my final cost—and improving my sales ranking on Amazon!

Where I am now sitting, I see a stack of nine "not ready for prime time" versions of my newest book, Aging & Ending: A first-year baby boomer looks back and ahead.

They're not good enough to sell or to submit to reviewers. I won't throw them away because book destruction has always seemed sinful to me. (I'm a Jew, part of "the people of the book.)

These rejects are good enough to not embarrass me if read by family, friends and business associates. 

So. I print up Avery#6464 labels which I stick on the inside of the front covers.  Try it. 

Buying copies of your own book

Every author needs to have copies of her own book, to distribute to potential reviewers, to give to family and friends, to keep around the house, or maybe even to sell. This is one area where you can really get soaked if you use a "self-publishing company" (A.K.A. a vanity publisher), so investigate before you sign a contract.

Xlibris offers discounts ranging from 30% to 60%, depending on the quantity ordered, which makes sense. However, they have an absolutely insane formula for setting the cover prices of books, which in turn establishes authors’ prices. The cover price for a book with 106 pages is $15.99. If you need 108 pages, however, the cover price jumps to $19.99—even though the difference in the manufacturing cost is about three cents and can’t possibly justify a $4.00 difference in cover price.

Strangely, the price for a book with 398 pages is also $19.99! But, at 400 pages the retail price jumps four bucks to $23.99, and that price holds all the way to 800 pages. The author’s cost for a book with 108 pages can be $2.80 more than the price of a book with 106 pages; but the costs for books with 108 pages and with 398 pages are the SAME.

Wheatmark says, “You may purchase additional books at 40% off the retail price.”

IUniverse offers its author/customers book discounts ranging from 20% to 65% off the retail price. The discounts depend on the quantity ordered and the company offers an extra discount to authors for special events such as book signings at a “recognized venue,” whatever that is.

Outskirts Press has a strange system of pricing authors’ copies. For a 300-page, $14.95 book, the discounts range from 34% to 48% off the cover price. You get a bigger discount with the “diamond” package than with the “sapphire” package. However, since you’ll pay $300 more for the diamond deal, with Outskirts, if you want to pay less, you’ll have to pay more.

These pricing systems demonstrate incompetence, idiocy, and ignorance.

•  The retail price of a book—unlike a car or a hammer—is often unrelated to its production cost. One fundamental point that self-publishing companies all seem to ignore is that the retail price of a book is a marketing decision and may have little or nothing to do with its printing cost.
• It does not cost any more to print a book with a $29.95 price printed on it than a book with a $9.95 printed on it. The self-publishing companies apply author discounts to the WRONG numbers. Even if these publishers don’t want to reveal their production costs, they could come up with discount schedules properly based on page count and trim size, NOT the cover price.
• If my printer charges $5 to print and ship a 300-page book, and I am the publisher, I pay $5 whether the cover price is one penny, one dollar, $8.95, $10.95, $14.95, $24.95, or $150.

• NOTE: This was written several years ago, and prices may have changed.

The Great Depression is still depressing the book business

Book returnability is a destructive artifact of the Great Depression

Sales of books, like most non-necessities, had fallen off greatly. In an effort to get bookstores to take in new books, the publishers offered guaranteed sales. Stores received the books “on consignment,” and, after several months, the money for the books that had been sold would be paid to the publishers. Unsold books would go back. This arrangement kept inventory on the bookstore shelves and helped create exposure for books on obscure topics or by unknown authors, but the logistics and waste added substantially to the cost of publishing.

When books are bought on consignment, bookstore owners don’t have to care if they order slow-sellers or outright flops because almost all unsold books can be returned to the publisher, or even be destroyed, and still generate a refund or credit from the publisher. This adds to the cost of publishing (increasing the prices of books) and wastes natural resources.

• There have been accusations that major book chains arrange to send back books — and reorder the same titles at the same time — so the stores always have inventory with no concern about paying for them.

Few if any other retail products are sold that way. Except for special circumstances, a Honda dealer can’t return unsold cars to Honda. A Sony dealer can’t return unsold TVs to Sony. A New Balance dealer can’t return unsold sneakers to New Balance.

Selling on consignment may have been a good solution in 1929, but nearly a century later it has become very expensive and wasteful. Book publishers and bookstores are in trouble.

If a bookstore operator knows that sales are guaranteed, and if a publisher’s salesperson is sufficiently pushy, and if money is offered for promotion, little thought may go into making a purchase. The store may “overbuy” and inflate the initial sales of a book, but the day of reckoning comes a few months later. If most of the copies of a new title are still sitting on the shelves, they get sent back to the publisher, where they are either remaindered and redistributed for the buck-a-book tables or shredded and pulped to become raw material for new books.

• Sarah Palin’s second book sold poorly, and many thousands were returned to the publisher. The cost of the waste was partially covered by the profit made on her first book, a bestseller.

The urgency that store operators feel to return books before they have to be paid for shortens the time available for a book to build a market.

The system also hurts authors.

It takes time for book promotion to have an effect and for word-of-mouth to build for a new author or niche subject. Nobody knows how many books, which might have been successful with another month or two or three on display in the stores, are considered flops.

Only now, in the 21st century, is there some slight movement away from the burdensome, wasteful process that was an important innovation that kept books available in the 1930s.

HarperStudio was an imprint (brand) of HarperCollins, launched in 2008. It started an experimental program to sell books to booksellers in a one-way transaction, in exchange for providing additional gross profit. The experiment failed and HarperStudio was shut down after two years.

Bookstores are also shutting down.

If you're going to give advice about publishing, first learn how to write

Borat's English is better.

Text below was copied from http://www.aaymca.com/have-you-considering-isbn-on-your-publishing-ebook-or-books/.

Almost everyone who write any books or even ebook are need a copyright. Moreover, you’ll recommended to obtained an ISBN as soon as possible. If you have considered all your choices and have decided that “self-publishing” makes the most fit for you. Please get ISBN to your as soon as possible. You may know that there is an extra in the need to “self-market” your eBook or books, but you must know that it’s also have correlation to boost your profits.


Do you Know about ISBN ?
Yeah..!! ISBN is stands for: “International Standard Book Number”. Most people aren’t know and understand what is an ISBN. ISBN is a number (commonly 10 digit)that would helps to recognize your book, ebook or even brand. The ISBN is commonly placed on the back of the book or product. This is look like a bar-code in a supermarket, wholesale and retail store. It’s capable to identify any products. It’s typically used to identify a book by the author or publisher. It’s so useful for any instance like booksellers, universities, libraries, wholesalers and many more as it’s capable to identify book or products easily and rapidly. Furthermore, it’s also applied on internet, I have seen ISBN search on valorebooks.com. That’s means you’re enabled to get books and any product rapidly and simply online.


Is it Important For Me ?
The answer of this question is depending on your needed. You would really really need ISBN if you are wanna sell or distribute your products like ebook or even book on major websites. However, it would be useless if you just purposed to distribute your ebook or books on your own sites. In a few case, this is needed to be one point of products qualification, some retailers and store won’t accept any products that doesn’t contain an ISBN. So, do you know whether or not it’s important for you ?


How To Obtaining an ISBN Number?
If you decide you’ll like to get an ISBN for your eBook or books, you could easily get it. There are various ISBN agencies in the worldwide that could aid you to joining your ebook or books to ISBN. If you’re published your book by a book publishing deal, you’ll most likely obtain the ISBN. You could also get the ISBN by self publishing agency especially through internet, if you wanna sale book yourself. Typically ISBN already provided for the publisher.


The cost
The price to buy an ISBN may seem to expensive for most people. The cost of getting an ISBN is about $80 to $ 500 or even more, it’s depending on the amount that you’ll purchase. In the worldwide, there are plenty resellers that provide and sell a single ISBN for about $50 to $ 65. Other way for the buy of an ISBN is by your book printer. The printing company usually give this as a service to the customers because they understand that you may not require a lot of ISBN numbers.


Self-publishing may looked so daunting, but if you know and understand about the strategies needed, it’s potentially could be successfully done. Furthermore, an ISBN is needed, you’ll also require to manage copyright issues.


In other words, you actually need to get an ISBN if you have a goal to market and sell your eBook on major sites, in store and many more. But, if you just wanna sell books on your sites, you could ignore this on your consideration. Firstly on your publishing, please ensure that you have already deciding your goal, so that you could prioritize the budgets for your publishing like the budget for getting ISBN.

Word change is usually OK, but deliberate or sloppy word misuse is evil. Especially by a publishing company

• "Don we now our gay apparel" gets a different reaction now than when the lyric was first sung.
• "Hooking up" doesn't have the same meaning that it did back in the 20th century.
• "Literally" is sometimes used to mean "figuratively."
• In England, a "fag" is a cigarette, and something can be "bloody" without bleeding.
• A comedian can "kill" an audience but cause no deaths.
• People seldom notice or complain about the contradiction in "guest host," or if a TV news guy signs off with "I'll see you tomorrow."
• "Son of a bitch" was once a nice alternative to calling someone a "dog."
• "Was like" has come to mean "said." I disapprove.
• "Hell" probably can't be raised.
• "Bad" can be good.
• "Fuck" has dozens of meanings.
• We often park in the driveway and drive on the parkway.
• Some people say "eggcorn" instead of "acorn."
• An "egg cream" has neither egg nor cream in it.
• My dog didn't object if I called a "cracker" or "dog biscuit" a "cookie," or if I said "get in the car" when I mean "get in the minivan."
• Media often say that a writer "published" a book, even though the writer was not the publisher.
• Some people say "Old Timers' Disease" instead of "Alsheimer's Disease."
• "An apron" was originally "a napron."
• Back in the 1960s, "The Boys' Clubs" were cometimes confused with the "W.E.B. DuBois Clubs"—a youth organization sponsored by the Communist Party in the USA.
• "Woulda," "coulda," "shoulda" and "gunna" are widely used, but shoulddn't be.
• A "cry baby" can be an adult. Even a Speaker of the House of Representatives.
• "You guys" can include females.
• "Alumnae" is often pronounced like "alumni."
• "Flammable" and "inflammable" can be synonyms or antonyms.
• An iPad is both "hot" and "cool."
• A "mouse" is not necessarily a small rodent.
• And the "notebook" used with that "mouse" does not have paper pages.

These shifts of meaning naturally occur. There are shifts in usage, misunderstandings, and even mistranslations.

It's much worse when a person, organization or business deliberately chooses to misuse a word to misdirect, misinform and confuse—and profit from the deception.

It is especially sad that two of the worst examples of word theft are in the publishing business.

Author Solutions, Inc. claimed to be "the world leader in indie book publishing—the fastest-growing segment of publishing."

• A writer who pays ASI to publish books is NOT indie, but is merely a customer of a huge company.

PublishAmerica said, “In the most commonly used context, POD indicates Publish On Demand.”

• That's a lie. The "P" in "POD" stands for "print," not "publish." Books can be printed on demand, but they can’t be published on demand.