The Hole Had a Slight Cave-in...
No, don't panic, no worries...the dragons and I are still standing, but one side of the proverbial hole crumbled and fell in, requiring me to stopping making the hole larger and deeper and to clean up the mess and reinforce the sides.
As I filled in the CreateSpace template, it was all going so well. I had finally figured out how to manipulate the various techniques of copying and pasting that meant with basic success. But I should have known that things were going too well. You know how you get this blissful feelings sometimes and you tell yourself that this is it? You're going to reach the goal in mind? Well, I should have figured it. Things just aren't that easy. Or at least for me they're not. It's a good thing I'm hard-headed and an old Scotsman. Hmmm. That's pretty much the same thing, isn't it? Ah, well.
Anyway, what happened was this. When it was all in, I downloaded the template to pdf, downloaded the pdf into CreateSpace and then began using the CreateSpace previewer they have. It's actually quite splendid. Sharp, accurate and has a defined field so you can see where your errors are. They place arrows at wherever there's a problem, whether it be an image that's not at least 300 DPI or if any of your text is out of the format, stuff like that. Great to use and work with.
Anyway, the book, In the Dead of Winter, came to be 686 pages. Yup, you read it right. 686 pages. I knew it was long, but in that 5x8 inch format, where part of the page is used for a gutter (the area toward the middle of each page that must be used to attach the page to the spine) the length became overwhelming since the page was narrowed.
I checked with the CreateSpace manufacturing tool where you can estimate the cost of your book considering the paperback's size and number of pages. It will cost me $15.00 just to break even. Now, I was already planning on making the first book as low a price as possible, making little or no profit on it, just to introduce the series to people in paperback. But $15.00? Wow!
That was where the hole caved in. Now, after cleaning up, reinforcing the walls, mumbling to myself, and talking to my Irish Fairy Godmother, Kate Eileen Shannon about it, I'm sitting in the hole, considering the options. At the present time those options are as follows: 1. Turning the book into two or three parts and selling them as a set. 2. Working with margins, size of font, and format to see just how small I can get the book without tearing it apart or making it unreadable. 3. Heaven knows.
The Heaven knows part will come as I think about all the possibilities. Once again, the technology has kicked my proverbial derriere, making me wish that I knew a lot more than I do about book design. The next steps will probably come in contacting the design geniuses at CreateSpace, finding out what creative solutions Kate has come up with, and taking a step back to think about it.
My small town mysteries tend to run a good deal longer than most cozy mysteries. But 686 pages is a bit over the top. So here I sit, in the hole, patting down the walls and thinking good thoughts. The dragons and I will continue to write book #14 in The Falls small town mystery series (The Falls: Brotherly Love) and continue to edit the ebook of In the Dead of Winter, which has needed editing for some time. So there will be no "down" time. (I say down time very quietly, because I don't need any more parts of the wall to come "down" you understand.)
So if you're looking for me. check deep down in the hole and I'll grin and wave back. May the dragons watch over you...and keep the walls solid on my hole...
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