What's a fair price for a 500-page trade paperback?

[Ming]

And if you do decide to do it... remember to have friends from across the country write positive reviews for you.
Heck, I'm sure some people here would help you with your marketing efforts.

GOOD LUCK

[rah]

Heck if its a sci-fi book, I'll buy it. I'm sure many others here would also. We could probably generate some buzz.

[Elok]

The plan, such as it is, is to see how far I can get it with word of mouth and then reassess. Lori and BUncle have been helping me get it in shape for about a month now, and it's pretty much all formatted. All that remains is typing up acknowledgments, getting the cover in order--BUncle's sister has very kindly offered to do some art--and submitting to Amazon CreateSpace. Oh, and then I get to figure out how to set up an Amazon store or something. I assume there are a number of FAQs on the subject. God help me if there aren't.

I guess I would describe it as "Sci-fi/fantasy." It's epistolary, written from the POVs of three different characters, and almost exactly five hundred pages if you include the appendices and glossary (yep, it's one of those books). Writing the back-of-cover blurb is going to be a weird experience.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Okay - now that I've been outed, I have to volunteer that the draft I read was very very good. I burned through it in a few days reading on the screen when I had a moment here and there in the course of busy days - and tended to go to bed an hour later than I'd planned. It sucks you in...

Y'all are gonna LOVE Cregor...

[C0ckney]

sounds great, elok. congratulations. be sure to set up a way for people to pay via paypal and suchlike.

[Elok]

CreateSpace is an Amazon subsidiary, so I don't know if they do PayPal--aren't they competitors somehow? Hopefully there's some kind of online payment option.

BUncle, don't hype it too much; I don't know how long it'll take to get the cover in order even after the art comes in, and after that comes Amazon's review process. I'm guessing this'n will be ready in late September or so.

[rah]

Late September........... We can keep one of Ben's BS threads alive for months, keeping interest in an actual book for 6 weeks should be a snap.
Feel free to keep using this thread for that, but more important, please keep us up to date on the process.

[Elok]

Well, I have discovered that, if you look through a lot of webpages about good fonts to use, you discover that pretty much all fonts in a given family look identical to anyone but a complete I-run-a-blog-about-my-hatred-for-Garamond spaz. Some webpage said use Palatino. Palatino looks okay. I'm going to use Palatino and not worry about it. Considered using a script font for titles but figured that'd be gimmicky/douchey.

[Elok]

I also have no idea whom to dedicate this thingy to.

[rah]

If not family then how about the people here.

[Uncle Sparky]

You're using this font?

[Elok]

In theory, yes. Palatino Linotype 10.5.

Now, I use OpenOffice (I grew up using its ancestor WordPerfect, and I just don't like MS in general), but CreateSpace can't read OO files. So I had to save the file in Word format. I got everything all lined up beautifully in OO . . . then uploaded to CS and discovered a whole bunch of page breaks had been chucked in by a little-known feature of OO. OO reads them as benign paragraph spacing, maybe a millimeter added automatically here and there to improve readability, but Word has no such feature and renders it as a page break. My book is now two hundred pages longer than I made it, and looks FUBAR. Also the page numbering is a total fustercluck, and the cute little page headers that told the reader what section he was in have disappeared. Next task: trudge through deleting two hundred or more needless pagebreaks, and learn how to get alternating page numbers to look right in Word. I don't, at present, have the energy to care about the headers, given what a PITA it was to get OO to format them, but that may change.

So I may wind up having to change the font too, who knows. I'll settle for Garamond or whatever some typeface nerd says is readable on paper. My top consideration will be not using anything that messes up the page count any further, because that will spell half an hour or more of formatting fixes.

[Lorizael]

I also have no idea whom to dedicate this thingy to.

You should get your wife's opinion on the dedication.

[Ming]

You should get your wife's opinion on the dedication.

ALWAYS a good idea... assuming you like being married

[rah]

Yeah, dedicating it to her seems the most sensible option.