Okay, the cover is done and the interior pages are done. Time to sit back and chill, right? No. Now comes the headache of getting the book ready for release. Before I get into the details, I’ll just throw out my good news: The Bounds of Magic is up and available for pre-orders at bookstores and most online platforms, press releases have been issued, and launch events are scheduled. Here are some places you can pre-order the book:
Before we continue…
You may not be familiar with Bookshop.org, so let me explain why I put their button first on that list. Amazon is both a monopoly and a monopsony with a stranglehold on the book industry. I don’t like to support them, but they’re a necessary evil at this point.
Bookshop.org, on the other hand, is a nonprofit that supports authors and independent bookstores. As an author, I get my royalty no matter where you buy my book (once the advance is paid out, of course). When you shop there, you can choose a participating indie bookstore and they’ll get a commission on every book you buy. Also, similar to Amazon’s affiliate program, if you go to my “virtual shop,” I’ll get a commission in addition to my royalty.
So if you buy my books on Bookshop.org, I make more per copy and you’re supporting your favorite independent bookstore.
Book design
I did my design based around the trade paperback edition of the book. I did all of the writing in Microsoft Word, being careful to use paragraph styles (body text, chapter titles, scene breaks, song lyrics…) and character styles (emphasis, internal dialog…). That made the import into Adobe InDesign for the final layout easy, but it took time to generate all the front matter and back matter, which includes:
- Half-title
- Frontispiece (map of Tryllevær)
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Content warnings
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Epigraph
- Pronunciation guide
- Acknowledgements
- About the author
- Other books by this author
Some of my nonfiction books also had glossaries, indexes, tables of illustrations, prefaces, forewords, and other things that this novels didn’t need. Whew! All of that came together reasonably quickly, and I was able to get the interior pages and the cover artwork off to the printers.
The book data doesn’t go out to distributors like Ingram, Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, Apple, and so forth until the book is finished and ready to go, so this all needs to be done early.
Once the paperback was off to the databases and I’d approved the electronic proof, it was time to move on to the next step.
The hardback
I chose to make the paperback and hardback both with a 6″ by 9″ trim size, pretty standard in the fantasy book world. This meant the only changes were the cover artwork (larger bleed area and a wider spine) and the copyright page.
There’s a common misconception that each book has a unique ISBN (International Standard Book Number). In reality, each version of the book needs its own. Paperback, hardback, ebook, special edition, they’re all different. The exception is ebooks for the Kindle. Since they’re proprietary to Amazon, they just issue their identifier, called an ASIN.
This means when you walk into your friendly neighborhood bookstore to special order a book they don’t have in stock, all you have to do it give them the ISBN. That will tell them the title, the binding, and everything else they need to know to get you the exact edition you want.
Since I kept the trim size the same for paperback and hardback, I was able to get the hardcover edition finished up and sent off to the printer in a day. Then came the real mess.
The ebook
The formatting of an ebook is very different from a print edition. For one thing, page numbers are out the window. Since e-readers can adjust the size of the type, the number of pages is different from one person to the next. Also, most e-readers allow a scroll mode that doesn’t break the book into pages at all, so the table of contents has to be specially generated to link to a place in the book without using page numbers.
There is a standard format for ebooks called EPUB. There are dozens of tools for converting your book to EPUB from DOCX (Word), INDD (InDesign), or even plain text and PDF. There are also numerous services that will do it for you. Do be careful with those, however, as some of them will use your book for training AI systems.
Amazon, of course, has their own ebook format, and I’ve spent many hours messing around with it in the past. Luckily, they now accept EPUB as well and do their own conversion.
I spent several days generating my EPUB, finding problems in it, fixing them, and repeating the process. That’s when I discovered that not all ebook publishers use the same EPUB verification tools. I got the book loaded into Amazon first, since that’s where most ebook sales happen these days, and then got hung up at IngramSpark, where I’m doing the rest of the ebook distribution. Their system reported a series of errors, but didn’t tell me where the error was in the file!
I use Calibre to generate EPUB files and do conversions, just like most industry professionals. It reported no errors in the file. I found another popular tool called Sigil that lets you get deep into the guts of the EPUB code. It, also, reported no errors.
I spent an hour digging through Google, Reddit, Quora, and any other resource I could find. No luck. If I didn’t have a background as a software engineer, I don’t know how I’d have solved this. In looking at the cryptic error messages from Spark, I happened to notice that the number of errors was the same as the number of chapters in the book. I started digging around in the chapter head code of the EPUB and found the problem. There was a modifier that wasn’t technically valid. Amazon ignored it. IngramSpark wouldn’t. I modified all of the chapter heads and everything went smoothly from there.
The waiting
The book started creeping into Internet databases a bit at a time. Luckily, it went smoothly into the largest book distributor database (Ingram iPage), so bookstores can preorder the books. Ditto with the Kindle version.
The print version took a week longer to show up on Amazon, and for some reason the paperback came through properly, but the hardcover is showing the back cover instead of the front cover. The different editions still aren’t linked together. For the first few days Bookshop.org showed only gray boxes for covers. The ebook still isn’t up on Apple Books.
I’ve had a Goodreads author page for many years. Somewhere in the system, the period after my middle initial got dropped on this book. Goodreads figured Gary D. Robson and Gary D Robson must be two different people. I understand why, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
Release day is a little less than four weeks away as I write this. My first hardcover publisher proof copy is (hopefully) arriving today. If all is well, I’ll be able to order books for my launch parties and book signings. Since I started the process early enough, I won’t have to pay expedited shipping.
Gary D. Robson 