Well, after a few hurdles I got the blogging essay collection uploaded to Kindle Direct (I wanted to try IngramSpark as a comparison but wasn't in the mood at the moment)...
Notice a Trend: 17 Years of Prime Blogging is now for sale!
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All because I had award-winning blog articles from the Florida Writers Association's Royal Palm Awards - see the gold sticker! - and needed a print book to put the award stickers.
The hurdles involved as always:
1) hiring someone to make the book cover. I went to Fiverr again and found cover designer Olinart who suggested a different approach that looked cleaner and fit the theme of the book better.
2) hiring someone to format the book for publication, because in spite of my years of writing and my background in journalism I still can't get the damn margins and book gutters (that space between printed pages where the bindery keeps it all together) figured out to a 6" x 9" alignment. PLUS getting the footnotes squeezed into the PDF was a headache, and this book on blogging - where the links to articles backing up your arguments normally go - won't go anywhere without proper citing.
Formatting to publication for fiction works seems pretty straightforward as a lot of designers offer to do that. Formatting non-fiction was a harder get, so I ended up going to a site called Reedsy where I sent out requests and got one back from Michael Vito T. who got the margins done, spaced pages to make it fit, and tweaked the fonts.
It still costs out of pocket to get these things done, but it's a far better - and more budget-friendly - method than dealing with Print-On-Demand services.
The eBook on Kindle is ready to go. The print paperback will take another three days for market. I'll amend this article when I'm sure the ISBN numbers are set.
Maybe with a fiction book I will attempt to publish via IngramSpark that way and test how that goes.
P.S. Funny Locations is doing well and I hope to find more short story fans!
