The car's the star

A few people have asked me about the cars featured in When She Was Bad so here they are for all the petrolheads missing their weekly Top Gear fix.

Claire’s Fiat Uno

The VW Karmann Ghia

The Fiat Multipla

Getting into print (Part One)

When we last moved house one of the removal men took one look at the room packed to the ceiling with boxes labelled BOOKS and gasped “Bloody hell ... have you guys never heard of a Kindle?!”
He had a point - over the years our bookshelves have expanded and groaned under the growing masses of hardbacks and paperbacks of every description. Most have been read but are unlikely to be re-read. Many have been loved and treasured but by no means all, and some remain unread and are quite likely to stay that way whilst they sit there, never quite attractive enough to graduate to the bedside table.
There’s no rational way to justify them. I’ve got a Kindle, we’ve got iPads and laptops and smart phones. But...
Books. Real books. Gotta love ‘em, can’t live without them.
I’ve nothing against eBooks - they’re just so convenient to buy and carry and make so much logical sense. You can read them across multiple devices and can change the typeface to suit your needs and have a zillion great features that print can never do. And as a rule they’re generally cheaper than the paper varieties too (even if they do incur VAT in the UK whereas physical books don’t).
But they’re not really books, are they? Like music on Spotify and movies on Netflix, you never really feel like they’re real.
I can look at my books on the shelf and recall where I was, when I was, when I read them, but I don’t do that with an eBook. Something’s not there. There’s a disconnect. I’ve even been known, if enjoying a book on the Kindle, to stop reading it half way through and then buy the paperback before continuing it.
I may have a problem, but I’m sure I’m not alone.
So when I published the first edition of When She Was Bad on Kindle it felt like a great achievement. It was fantastic that I could share it with friends who had been supportive during all of the work I put into it. Jenny read it on her iPad, Tina read it on her Kindle, Dan read it on his latest smartphone. Friends weren’t just buying it to support me but were actually reading and enjoying it.
But it still didn’t feel like a real book.
One of the neat things about the Kindle edition is that I could revise it at no cost to either me or the kind people who had already paid for it. I knew that there would be typos, possibly plot problems too - with self-publishing, there’s no experienced Editors acting as a safety net to wheedle out the faults and fix them - and I was able to incorporate early feedback and issue a ‘fixed’ version distributed a few weeks after the initial eBook had been launched.
But it still wasn’t real.
I still wasn’t in ‘print’.
But now that the text was as good as I could make it, I needed to put some ink on paper.

And onto the shelf (Into Print, part two)

These days there are various options available for printing books ‘on demand’, i.e. when a customer order the book a copy is printed, bound and shipped to them within a matter of hours. Quite remarkable - the days of expensive ‘Vanity Publishing’ printing are now long gone.

I found that Amazon has a company called CreateSpace. They do all kinds of things but the service I wanted was their trade book publishing. (They also offer a number of design services which I didn’t need as I know my way around preparing PDF files for professional production.) The main CreateSpace service is based in the US, but copies for the UK and EU are printed and shipped from Bedford, so only copies bought direct from CreateSpace incur hefty shipping costs. I didn’t research other companies as the testimonials for CS were excellent.

Once I had the final, final version of my text I had to get my pages ready for print. I’d written When She Was Bad in Microsoft Word and could have produced PDFs directly from my final draft, but Word isn’t a professional publishing tool and is known to have a number of annoying idiosyncrasies with its PDF export. It also lacks typesetting essentials such as full kerning and ligature controls. I wanted my book to look as good as it possibly could so I completed the pages using Adobe InDesign, laying out my text into an 8x5in template. I set the book in 11pt Baskerville and removed the automatic hyphenation (neater to manually hyphenate a word and only then if absolutely necessary). I then went through all 260 pages tidying away any widows or orphans (short lines at the top or bottom of a page) and ensuring all the text on each page was neat, compact but not too crowded. I haven’t worked as a sub editor for over 25 years but it is easy work when it’s your own words you’re fitting.

CreateSpace details its PDF requirements on the site but I didn’t find the margins, trim and bleed instructions particularly helpful. My wife Jenny, a designer by trade, had to slightly rework the cover she’d designed for the Kindle edition for the paperback sizing, and added a back cover and the spine and barcode panels. We needed to use a higher resolution picture of a Prada rucksack for the print version (300dpi rather than the 72dpi that had been okay for Kindle) and ended up using a different bag for print.

I added additional text on copyright, a few blank pages front and back, and an Author’s Q&A I did with a friend. CreateSpace provided the required ISBN free, which was included in their barcode. All done. 

I uploaded it to CreateSpace and they performed a full check at their end. One small correction was required and then I clicked the magic button to order a proof copy. The proof copy was $4.21 and the postage was $14.38 as I wanted it that week (I just couldn’t wait!), so that was $18.59 (£14.13) for my very first copy of my very first book.

As CreateSpace is an Amazon company it was on sale on all their sites almost immediately and they do all that ‘Look Inside’ and ‘Sample magic’ for me. The price you can charge is dictated by page size and page count and I wanted to keep it low reasonably low. I set it at £7.99 here and $9.99/€9.99 elsewhere. I make roughly the same royalty on the paperback as I do on the £1.99/$2.99 Kindle edition - £1.29 a copy. I can buy copies for myself via CreateSpace for $4.21 each, but they ship from the US so it’s not not that great a saving for me from the UK price unless I buy in volume.

At the time of writing I’ve sold 80 copies, with another dozen I’ve bought and distributed myself. As the Kindle version is cheaper and was available first it accounts for the majority of sales, but I’m hoping the paperback will pick up some momentum once I start marketing it.

It’s been a great thrill putting my first novel on my shelf - I can’t recommend it highly enough, well worth the fourteen quid it took to get it there. I’m happy to answer any questions anyone may have on what I’ve done.