We have a speech on April 4th, and we really want to sell some copies of Kea's Flight there. People at speeches have been asking about our science fiction novel for years, and now's our chance to show them something, finally.
However, even without the selling markup, the print edition of the novel costs over 11 dollars, which is fine if we want just one or two copies, but we can't afford to really stock up for speeches, especially if we're not sure they're going to sell. So I spent all of yesterday evening trying to engineer an edition that we could print in bulk for speeches without going bankrupt.
Luckily, our self-publishing service charges pretty much the same amount per page, regardless of the pages' height and width. So the speech edition ended up being, perhaps, the first 8.5" x 11" science fiction novel ever printed. That plus a one-point reduction in font size got it down from the realm of 600 pages to 190-something. Strangely, it didn't cut the price down by the same proportion, so Lulu's pricing rules must be more complex than we'd thought, but at least it got it within the range of affordability.
People at the speech may be weirded out by the book's size and shape, but we shall console them with the fact that it also contains an extra feature that is not in the versions available online: a lexicon of the made-up language described in the novel.
Ah, the joys of being our own publishers.
No comments:
Post a Comment