by Mary Hickey This post is about my experience arranging foreign publication for a book where I felt that I needed a specialty publisher. The reasons included the unusually detailed cover design for Cautionary Tales, which needed very high-resolution printing, and also strict adherence to the color palette the artist used. This required a special cover stock that Amazon doesn’t have. Not yet, anyway! I also believed that a significant proportion of my potential buyers would be Europeans that I know from backgammon. I did go with Amazon for the eBook, as Kindle is as close to an “industry standard” for eBooks as it gets, and the issues I noted don’t apply to an eBook. Take a look by clicking on this URL address (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C54B37M7) or image below! My first piece of advice to anyone who wants to try this path to publication, is decide whether it’s worth extra time and money. It’s more expensive even when you go with Print on Demand (aka POD) and don’t pre-order a quantity of your book. It also requires getting to know the Nielsen system used in Europe as well as the Bowker system used here, which will inevitably take time unless you’re already familiar with it, which I wasn’t. My second piece of advice is to be patient with the much slower pace of getting your book from final edit to actual production. There will be inevitable delays, and it’s better to expect them than not. If the book took you years to write, it’s better not to rush it to print anyway. Get the details right, and you’ll be happier with the result. Along that line, if you want it ready for Christmas, try for having it available by summer. Otherwise, you’re risking a crunch at the end and not having it ready until the following year. Third, don’t neglect pricing for the international markets, if that was part of your reason for creating a premium edition in the first place. Some courses for writers on this subject advise you to learn all about what people in other countries normally pay for a book like yours, and then adjust your price country by country accordingly. There’s nothing wrong with that approach except the length of time it will require, which I felt would be excessive. Instead, I took my US price, adjusted it for the currency exchange rates anyone can easily find with a browser search, and then rounding to an amount ending in .99. My experience has been that the costs, glitches and delays are too numerous to make this path from manuscript to printed book and eBook the best choice for any book I’m writing or have written, except for Cautionary Tales. I will use more conventional means, including possibly Amazon KDP’s on-demand printing, for my next two books if they aren’t taken in by one of the royalty publishers. So far, I don’t have a print version of Cautionary Tales available on Amazon, though I expect that will happen very soon. For now, there’s only the eBook, which as noted above, you can check out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C54B37M7 and also read three of the stories in it for free.
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