It’s been a while coming, but Dragonlinked is now available as a Trade Paperback from CreateSpace.com at the link HERE. So, if you’ve thought about picking it up, but didn’t have an eBook reader, now’s your chance! The production quality is very nice too; I showed one of the proofs to my critique group and it wowed them.
The process of getting it set up on CreateSpace.com was fairly simple too. Well, aside from the formatting changes I had to make. In the eBook world, there are no such things as ‘pages,’ per-se. They are more like web pages than anything, in that you sort of just scroll through the document. So, my manuscript didn’t have page numbers, nor headers in which to place page numbers. And what should the headers look like anyway? I went to my room and pulled a few dozen books off the bookcase and took a sampling of their page layouts. The majority of layouts seemed to have the page numbers at the tops of the pages, on the outside edge, and the headers on the odd pages had the book title centered, with the even-numbered pages having the author’s name centered. So I saved my manuscript as a new document and made all the formatting changes in there. I also noticed that on the first page of a new chapter, there were no headers. I had to Google how to do that (in OpenOffice, place your cursor somewhere on the page and select the page style “First Page”). There were a few other minor adjustments, like adding the ISBNs to the copyright page, and I also added an About the Author page, which I had not included in the eBook version.
Once I completed all the formatting, I printed it to a PDF printer (exporting as PDF would probably work as well) which creates a PDF document as its output. I had to make sure I selected one of the predefined PDF formats that included the fonts in the PDF document. CreateSpace.com requires that because they do not have every font. This allows the author to use whatever font or fonts they want in their book, and CreateSpace.com can still print it. I then uploaded the PDF to CreateSpace.com. Next, I had to tweak the cover image.
The cover that CreateSpace.com needs is the entire outside cover of the book: back, spine and front. The cover is actually what took the longest to get right. Because it can vary so much from book to book, due to page counts and book dimensions chosen, they can’t give you a prefect template for the cover. If you think about it, you’ll realize why. A book with 100 pages will have a much thinner spine than a book with 500 pages. As such, the overall width of the cover will also be different. At any rate, I sent a cover with my best guess based on their template. It took about 24 hours for CreateSpace.com to do their own checking of the documents. When they were done, they let me know the book was ready for proofing. I ordered a physical proof (they print and send you and actual book as it will be printed for customers, with only the word “Proof” added on the last page) and made adjustments based on the proof I got. It took me four proofs, but it finally got to the point I was satisfied.
It’s a great feeling to hold a physical copy of it in my hand. 🙂
Adventures in Lethera 