On Amazon§
by Russell Dyer
published: dec 23, 2009; revised: sep 10, 2017; readers in past month: 227
Finally, I’ve managed to get my novel listed on Amazon’s web site. If you click on image of the book cover here, you can see it there — and order it! It took some doing to get it there. If you’ve been reading my web site regularly, you know I had originally used Lulu.com to print my book — publishing it myself. That started out well, but after getting an ISBN number, the price went to twenty-four dollars and after three months never made it to Amazon’s web site. I don’t expect to sell many copies of my book, but I can’t exactly call myself a novelist without my novel listed on Amazon.
More importantly, I wanted to go through the experience of publishing a novel, to learn about all that is involved. Well, I have learned much. I moved my novel to CreateSpace.com, a subsidiary of Amazon. Since the size of the book is different, about the size of a DVD case, I had to adjust the cover layout and the text. In the photograph on the left you can compare the sizes of the previous printing at Lulu and this new on at CreateSpace. Underneath them is a DVD case. I spread them apart, so you can see the width comparison: the DVD and the book are actually the same width. The book is about a half of an inch longer that the DVD. Some people prefer the smaller size of the old printing, but I’ve always liked this size (8 x 5 1/4 inches). It’s now 240 pages, and no longer 320 pages as before. Best of all, I was able to lower the price from $24 to $12.
You may also notice that I changed the cover. Although I liked the previous cover (see the small image below), several people said they didn’t like the white band at the bottom of the front and the dark green on the back. It took me quite a while to recrop that photograph to fit on the larger cover and to wrap it around to the back side. Now that I see it in my hands, I think I like the front cover of the old one and the back of the new one. I may redo the cover if I can without having make it a second edition. I’m not sure how the ISBN and CreateSpace work with regards to changing the cover. The photograph on the old cover, the way it was cropped, it made the pink lit chamber look further away and more mysterious, more like we’re searching for someone&mash;as if to say, ‘Is Kafka hiding down this hall, in this crypt?’. Of course, the book has nothing to do with Kafka or crypts. Still, it added more of a sense of mystery. So, I may try to put the front cover as it was, or at least close to it, and leave the new back cover the way it is now.
I’ve sold about a dozen copies novel while it was in beta mode and have only received feed back from two people so far. If you buy a copy, please let me know what you think of it. Even if you didn’t like it, please let me know and why you didn’t like it. I really want feedback. I think and hope people will enjoy reading it, but I’m biased. I’m still developing my novel writing style and can only get better if people tell me where I have problems. This first one is written in an entertaining style. The second one is a more serious story. I seem to be developing a couple of different writing voices — I don’t want to merge them, though. So, it’s going to take a lot of input to hone two writing styles — three if you count my technical writing style.