Chaos behind the scenes

Tags

ALLi, Alliance of Independent Authors, colour, cover, CreateSpace, Gardners, Ingram Spark, ISBN, KDP, Niel, spine

I can imagine that you’re all thinking how lazy I am – no Sam updates, no new plot developments, not a bean.  But you would be wrong, as I am knee-deep in behind-the-scenes Sam work.  As you know, it is a dream of mine to get the Planks into every bookshop in the land.  I have tried to find out how to achieve this on numerous occasions but the picture is so confused and murky that I have always failed – until now.  (You may remember my short-lived excitement at getting myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen here in the UK – an achievement that has resulted so far in precisely zero sales.)  But then – thanks in no small measure to the advice and encouragement I have received from ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors, which I cannot recommend too highly) – the lightbulb has been lit.  To be order-able from UK bookshops I need to be listed with wholesaler Gardners, and to get into their catalogue I need to print my books via Ingram Spark (part of the Lightning Source family) as well as via KDP (CreateSpace-as-was).

Simple, you might think.  But there are a couple of snags – one I have solved, and one I continue to battle.  The solved one is to do with ISBNs.  When I first published the Sam books with CreateSpace (now absorbed by Amazon and part of their KDP platform) I chose to use the free ISBNs handed out by CS, rather than buying my own.  But IS will not print and distribute a book that uses a CS ISBN – and so I need to withdraw the original books and their ISBNs from sale and replace them with new books using new ISBNs that I have bought myself.  Buying ISBNs is easy but not cheap; I bought ten of them for £159.  And changing the ISBNs on the KDP books is simple: you just withdraw the old books and then upload the same files again but quote the new ISBN and the cover will be adjusted automatically.

Which brings me to my unsolved snag: the cover.  The cover files I have were designed for use with CS books and were created using a CS template, which was manufactured to the right specifications given my cover size and the number of pages.  People warned me that IS uses thinner paper than CS, which means that the IS books are slimmer than their CS cousins – which in turn means that the spine dimensions on the IS cover file will be wrong.  I enquired with my cover designer about adjusting the files to meet IS dimensions – and was quoted £75 per cover, for five books….  Not an inconsiderable sum (which would require a significant – and probably unrealistic – boost in sales to justify the outlay).  Could I get away with the original cover files, I wondered?  So I just tried it: I registered with IS and created a new title and uploaded the interior and cover files that I use for CS/KDP.  There was a bit of a hiccup when the IS system said that the interior PDF did not have embedded fonts, but an hour’s work sorted that out.  And IS seemed happy enough with the cover file – all looked fine with the online proof.  I went ahead and ordered a paper proof, and it arrived today.  Two things are obvious: the cover file is not quite right, and the colour is very different:

The colour difference looks worse because they are side by side (that’s the brighter CS one on the left and the duller IS one on the right) but it is disappointing.  And the spine will just not work (that’s the original CS copy on the top, with the slimmer IS one below):

My engineer husband has suggested simply adding some blank pages to the IS interior file, to bulk it up to fit the spine, and has offered to get out his micrometer to measure the page thickness and work out exactly how many cushioning pages I will need.  As they say, back to the drawing board.

Making a deposit

Tags

CreateSpace, ISBN, legal deposit, Nielsen, publisher, self-publishing

For the most part, self-publishing is a grand adventure and to be recommended.  But there are some regions of the publishing world that are very hard to navigate solo, and one of these is legal deposit.  Back in the mists of time (OK, it was January 2017), I had a brainwave: I would get myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen.  Nielsen is the key book distributor here in the UK, and when a bookshop wants to stock a title, they generally order it through Nielsen.  Nielsen then contacts the publisher and orders the copies to be sent on.  In theory, if I was listed as a publisher, a customer desperate to get their mitts on a Sam Plank novel could go into any bookshop in the country and place an order which would make its way from bookshop to Nielsen to me.  What could go wrong?  Well, I have indeed been listed as a publisher with Nielsen for eighteen months now, and how many orders have I received?  Not a single one.  Hey ho, as they say.

But it’s worse than that, my self-publishing friends.  My books – the five Sam Plank novels and the dozens of non-fiction titles that I produce in my day-job guise as an adviser on money laundering – are all published as print-on-demand paperbacks by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.  In South Carolina.  In America.  Not in the UK.  Here in the UK we have a regime called legal deposit.  It’s been around since 1662, and the current legislation – the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 – requires that “a person who publishes in the United Kingdom a work to which this Act applies must at his own expense deliver a copy of it to an address specified by any deposit library entitled to delivery”.  Fair enough.  But a few weeks ago I received an email from the legal deposit people asking for one of my non-fiction titles – which are, as I said, published in South Carolina.  In America.  I explained all of this, but they insisted and so I sent them a copy.  A week later another demand arrived, for another book.  I bleated “South Carolina” again, and this time they said that perhaps I should have a word with Nielsen, who supply them with their data on books published in the UK.

Heavens, Alex at Nielsen is a nice chap, and I got the impression that he likes nothing more than a mystery.  The two titles in question have ISBNs which show that they are indeed American publications – South Carolina, don’t you know – but the spreadsheet showed their place of publication as UK.  Hence the legal deposit demands.  Alex was on the case, and within a day emailed me to say that they had tracked down the error, worked out had gone wrong, and rectified it.  My publications now all show – correctly – as being American in origin and therefore beyond the grasp of legal deposit.

I’m not being mean about it, and of course I support the concept of legal deposit to preserve the nation’s published output (as the British Library would have it).  But if I have to source and supply a copy of each of my books “at [my] own expense”, that’s quite an outlay: each has to be ordered from CreateSpace and shipped to me before I send them on to the five legal deposit libraries – each copy would cost me about £15 in total, and I have nearly forty titles!  (Forty titles times five libraries times £15 is a staggering £3,000.)  It’s not something that occurred to me at all when choosing my print-on-demand publisher, but I’m now thanking my lucky stars that I opted for one in South Carolina rather than Southall or Southampton.

Helping Sam to storm the bookshops – or not

Tags

bookshop, CreateSpace, Fatal Forgery, G David, ISBN, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Toppings

As you may know, I had a Major Triumph last week when Toppings in Ely, a fabulous independent bookshop with perhaps the best views from its windows, agreed to stock “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  Buoyed with enthusiasm, I decided to think a bit more about real bookshops as well as online ones.  One of my real bookshops is G David in Cambridge, and as we were chatting they suggested that I could try to get my books listed on Hive, which – bit confusing this – is a website that lists books in local bookshops.  You can buy them online, and then collect them from the bookshops.  An interesting hybrid approach.  But Hive also stocks books on their own account, and – as they are obviously imaginative people – I contacted them and explained my plight.  Is there any way, I asked, that my CreateSpace self-published books could be listed on Hive, with me personally fulfilling any orders that come in (and passing on a commission to Hive, of course).

And back came this reply, which I am sharing with those of you who have also been bitten by the self-publishing bug, as it is the clearest explanation I have read of the current situation for self-published authors here in the UK (or, at least, not in the US): “CreateSpace is a publisher that is based in the US that has not yet set up a UK based distributor.  This means that we are unable to consider any title published by CreateSpace because we are simply unable to source CreateSpace titles at this time.  Currently there’s only two ways that we can purchase CreateSpace titles:

1. You buy copies from them, list yourself on Nielsen as the distributor and then our orders would come directly to you.
2. You reprint using a new ISBN, list yourself on Nielsen as the distributor and then our orders would come directly to you.”

Neither of those options appeals to me at the moment (the first would definitely knock out any profit I could make, what with postage from the US and then postage on to buyers, while the second would cause confusion with two ISBNs per title), but it is certainly useful to have a clearer understanding of the distribution (or non-distribution) of self-published titles in the UK at the moment.  What we need, of course, is a CreateSpace UK – which has been promised for years.