Hard Copy

You may be wondering where I’ve been all week. On the other hand you may be saying, thank god for a bit of peace and quiet.

Fact is, I’ve been working on the paperback edition of The Handshaker.

There are those people (like me) who still prefer the feel of a paperback in their hands. It does have some advantages over the e-reader. You don’t have to plug it into the mains every so often to charge it up, you can write your shopping list in the margins, and if the novel is really bad, you can always use it to light the barbecue.

E-publishing has made the whole world of fiction so much simpler for writers. It’s opened the doors for many fine works which would otherwise never have seen the light of day, and there’s no question that it is the future. My publisher, Crooked Cat Books is an e-publisher. E-sales are rocketing.

But I still get the occasional query; “When will this title be available in paperback?” and since The Handshaker is a self-published title, I thought I’d give it a go.

The problem with paperbacks is the cost. Even with today’s Print On Demand (POD) technology, whereby you don’t need to hold stocks of the book, it’s still a three-figure investment to get a paperback out. For any author wishing to supply bookshops with his/her title, you’re talking thousands of pounds/dollars.

Lulu led the way in setting up titles at little or no cost to the author. I used them for some years. Createspace have been working in the USA for some time, but the cost of shipping books from the US to Europe had always been prohibitive, and what’s worse, the time lag made it unprofitable for most British/European authors.

So the good news this week was that Createspace have begun printing and distributing from Great Britain. It remains to be seen how effective this operation will be in cutting down delivery delays, but because Createspace is an Amazon company, they can compete with Lulu’s steep delivery charges, saving you, the customer, money.

Their set up system is not easy. It’s taken me all week and about ten attempts to get it right, but it’s done and The Handshaker in paperback, should appear on the Amazon sites within the next few days.

Stay tuned for further news.