Tag: publishing

Categories
general

Paragraph Line site, reissues

AITPL8I’ve been slowly working on what to do about the Paragraph Line web site and social media and whatnot, as both me and John have been releasing books and have no idea how to sell them. Anyway, I did a quick reboot of the web site, and it’s live again at http://paragraphline.com/. It’s currently an incredibly rough static site, just so if someone sees the link on a book cover or whatever and clicks it, they get something.

None of the blog is there, so none of the fiction we published about ten years ago is there. I still have this stuff stashed away, and I’ve thought about republishing it, starting up the slush queue again, and going back to daily blogging, releasing other flash fiction, and that whole thing. Ultimately, that had an incredibly low ROI, and I wasted a lot of time for very little traffic. I got a lot of submissions from people who obviously never looked at the site whatsoever. I also got a lot of traffic from people who had Bizarro-related fiction who couldn’t get it placed at any official Bizarro outlet, so lots of second-rate stuff. There were exceptions, but I did not like spending all my time sifting through the queue, begging people to read the damn thing, and screaming into the void. Faced with that versus actually writing, I chose the latter.

Aside from the content generation and the general algorithm issues, I struggled with tooling. WordPress is basically a virus vector disguised as a CMS, and the “you can do anything with WordPress” people are all designers charging an obscene amount for development. I tried firing up a Ghost instance in AWS and moving everything there, and it didn’t really work well. I also recently tried pulling it into Hugo, and it was a bit of a disaster. I finally gave up and used a static template, which looks okay, but blogging there is not going to be a thing at all.

Social media-wise, I have no idea what to use. I’m absolutely not using Twitter. I think all Meta platforms are impossible to get any reach. All the kids are using Bluesky now, so I just created a profile @paragraphline and maybe someday someone will follow it. This all falls firmly into “I have no time for this” and I’m trying to get the next book done, so it won’t happen in the immediate future.

* * *

Related: John has re-released three of his books in one volume; check out After the Jump: A Trilogy. And I’ve still got my book from December you should check out, Decision Paralysis.

* * *

One of the things that came to mind as I was assembling this books page was the large number of books I have that are now out of print. This was intentional for a few reasons, but I fret over what I should do about this. It’s not as easy as “well just re-list them” because, well, it isn’t.

I currently have 18 books that were published at one point, and four of them are currently for sale. I think the short answer here is a combination of the fact that I am really proud of the four that are currently out, and four is more than zero, so at least there’s that. But when I think about reissuing the others, there are a few things stopping me.

First, there are quality issues. I get unending shit about “you need to hire an editor” which always bothers me. In one sense, it’s like telling Iggy Pop he needs to re-record Raw Power with autotune, because some of the notes aren’t hit perfectly. Also, I’m not going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to an editor on a book that’s going to sell 14 copies with a profit margin of like 29 cents a copy. That said, I find typos in these old books, and if I’m going to reissue them, I at least want to sweep through them and fix things.

And the problem with pulling that thread at the edge of the sweater is I will quash typos, but along the way I’ll find paragraphs that are uneven or places I wish I’d expanded or stories that didn’t end right or… whatever. There’s an argument for changing things significantly in a new reissue. Like William Burroughs published three very different versions of The Soft Machine in his lifetime (and a fourth posthumously) and he had no problems ripping out half the book, adding back as many new pages, and rearranging the whole thing. Part of me thinks doing that would be fun. Part of me thinks it’s a bit too George Lucas. And either way, this would require a lot of time I don’t have.

I think there’s also the issue of me having past work I’m not proud of. Sometimes I go back into an old book and find it’s aged well, and parts are still funny or well-written. But there are times I look at some stuff like the trilogy of flash books (Earworm, Sleep, Thunderbird) and I feel like maybe 50% of it is solid, and the rest is plain embarrassing. (The two zine-book things, Help… and Ranch are similar. And I reread He recently and it’s absolutely horrible.) There’s a lot of gonzo writing that’s largely scatological and stupid, and I feel the people who are fans of that aspect of my old writing, that persona I used, will never get what I’m trying to do now. And it’s definitely not stuff I want coworkers or potential employers to read. A lot of it would straight up get me cancelled at this point. I don’t want to write like this anymore, and spending time reintroducing stuff that I’m actually ashamed of now is a fool’s errand. Maybe I could do a “greatest hits” with just some of this stuff picked out. Once again, that’s a lot of time invested that could be used on writing new books.

There are books that are simply too far off my path to even deal with. Memory Hunter was a fun experiment and I loved doing it. The writing maybe 80% holds up. But nobody got the joke, and those of my fans who did read it all said it was good but not Konrath enough. Summer Rain is tough, because it was my first book and it meant a lot to me. And its fans are into that heavy 90s nostalgia, but I absolutely do not want to work in that genre anymore. Nostalgia is pain, and it doesn’t help that 40% of the country is actively destroying this country trying to go back to a time that never existed because of their delusions about the past. The Necrokonicon falls into that category, too. The Vegas book and the journal book that nobody read were both quickie get-something-out experiments that failed.

That leaves Rumored and Atmospheres. Spoiler alert: both of those have sequels that are well underway. So there may be a tie-in rerelease of either or both, but there’s a combination of all of the above problems with them. Like I’ve been rereading Atmospheres a lot recently and there are some absolutely solid riffs in there that I love. And then there’s some borderline sexist diatribe or embarrassing scatalogical bit that does nothing for the story and is just “look at me! I’m crazy!” writing. I’ve actually paid an editor to proof both of those books and search out the typos, but I don’t know what to do about questionable content.

And case in point on all of this: I reissued Vol. 13 last fall. I did a quick editing pass, changed the ebook layout, and redesigned the cover. I don’t know how many hours I spent on the project, but it was not a quick job. Since then it has sold five copies. I make about two bucks a book. So the “you could just pay someone else to do it for you” argument sort of falls flat, as I’d probably sink a few hundred bucks into it and get back ten of it. And I’d be rolling the dice on getting a layout I’d actually like.

Bottom line: I’m writing a lot right now, and that’s the focus. So, more of that, right?

Categories
general

John Sheppard’s latest, Fire Retardant Strong Man

Back in the day, Paragraph Line consisted of a bunch of things: semi-frequent flash fiction, weird and strange blogging, books by many great writers, a lit journal, and zines. But it was also created by me and John Sheppard for a specific reason: to publish our books. In 2010, we bought a block of 100 ISBN numbers to use as we churned out our own books.

Both John and I saw our writing output go fallow about four years ago. This was a combination of The Algorithm and the business of selling books, and life in general getting in the way. But right as I came back and published Decision Paralysis, John also came out with a new one, called Fire Retardant Strong Man, which is now available in print and on Kindle at Amazon.

I blurbed the book by saying it’s like if Kurt Vonnegut wrote Idiocracy, because it reminds me of the dystopian dumb-apocalypse of Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy (now documentary), but it reads in the style of Vonnegut classics like Slapstick or Cat’s Cradle. It takes place a few decades from now in a world where a group of billionaires called The Broligarch rule the country, which is under strict surveillance and everyone is in forever debt and spends their time endlessly watching The Scroll.

It follows an Ohioan named William who fish-out-of-water ends up in a small town in Colorado, in hiding and caught in a dangerous scenario trying to frame an evil senator who is the third-wealthiest man in America, and enslaves is new girlfriend Hazel.

FRSM is a straight-up page turner, a burn through William’s story as he tries to piece together a plan to escape with Hazel and topple Senator Charles Chase. But it’s also a heartfelt tale about an innocent young man finding out about the cruel new world and how he can fight against it.

This book is a lot of fun, with great humor and a critique of everything from AI to big brother to oligarchy to porn. Spoiler alert: there’s an easter egg that crosses over to the Konrath-iverse, too. And I think the best thing about this is John’s firing on all cylinders and has much more gas in the tank here.

Check it out over at Amazon. And as for Paragraph Line, we’re getting there. Both of us are busy writing, which is the good news. I need a new web site, and that’s underway. And we’re slowly re-releasing a bunch of our old books that are out of print. Stay tuned.

Categories
general

My new book Decision Paralysis is out now

Decision Paralysis bookI’m very happy to announce my 18th book, Decision Paralysis, is out now.

TL;DR: Amazon print and Amazon kindle links.

I did not think I was ever going to write another book. I quit writing completely in 2021, and spent at least a year 100% away from it, not even calling myself a writer, not sure what to do with my life except work, eat, and sleep. But I’ll always be a writer. I could not quit. And I needed to tell myself that I had to write the next book, even if nobody read it, even if the market had completely vanished and would be replaced with dumb AI-generated murder mysteries that end on a cliffhanger with a link to buy the next of 29 books in the series. The algorithm has killed everything, but it has not killed me.

I spent the first few months of 2024 knocking around a few other projects before I got to this. On 5/27/24, I started this book in earnest, with only a title and about 8,000 words of scraps. By the end of July, I had the idea that this book would be the spiritual successor to The Failure Cascade, which I’d re-released a few months prior. I wanted longer stories, more bleak, more introspective, and with a thickness and depth I wasn’t getting in the short micro-fiction or flash I’d been doing in the last decade.

Aside from telling myself “just write,” the biggest change in my work habits was moving my writing time to mornings. Waking up at 3:45 and sitting in my office in darkness for a few hours listening to weird ambient music put me in a different headspace and made the words start to add up. I think in early August, I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and that was the original intention. I’d originally had these short flash interstitials between stories, and at some point, I pulled all of them out and focused just on the stories. I also started footnoting things, which may be devisive, but I had fun with it.

A bit of an easter egg and a change is that the titles of each story are latitute/longitude coordinates. They have meaning; that’s all I’ll say. I’ve had a very specific format for titles that I think were funny, but as I am battling this persona problem, I think I got backed in a corner with them. I found that the people who thought the goofy titles were haw-haw funny were also the ones who basically didn’t get what I’m trying to do with my writing. So, clean break from that.

It’s also always bugged me when my stuff was too short, or perceived as such. I mean, some of the books are; The Failure Cascade is 37,565 words. Any time someone told me, “It was so great because I could sit down and read it in one sitting” it was a bit of an insult, especially when that was basically my annual output of 2020. So I purposely went maximalist on some of the stories here. The best/worst example is the titular story of the book, which is 16,000 words. For comparison, 2017’s Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out! — the entire book — is 30 stories that total 15,848 words. That story is like “The Aristocrats” in that it was long and essentially useless (at it’s core, it’s about someone trying to buy lunch who can’t find anything to eat) and at like 3,000 words, I thought it was getting excessive; at about 5,000 I thought “I should just make the whole book this story” and it quickly shot up to 10,000 words. It took another 6,000 to finish the thing, and it’s about everything but ordering food now.

This book was therapeutic to me. I think I was able to explore a lot about why I’m here and what I’m doing. I’ve struggled a lot in recent years with the big dillema of what I am and how I’m supposed to finish the rest of my years. I have no children and no legacy, and there’s honestly no hope that any of this writing exists beyond me. I could write a lot more about this, but the TL;DR is that I covered some of it here, and I probably need to do more.

Final tally: 20 stories; 412 pages; 101,834 words; 249 footnotes.

The description from the back cover:

Euthanasia drug MLMs. Deep-fried lard rumored to have mystical healing properties sold at pirate-themed restaurants. Existential crises about dollar-menu tacos and light therapy. Is this your average terror nightmare, or just another Thursday where mind-reading dolphins are dialing 1-900 numbers to spill secrets about how DARPA taught them to master Minesweeper?

Decision Paralysis by Jon Konrath is a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of absurdity and modern disconnection. The book plunges into a fragmented narrative where dystopian satire meets introspective nihilism. Inside, you’ll find twenty deranged tales of John Denver Illuminati theories, Taco Bell stealth tanks, Cambodian pizza chains that secretly sell time machines, and bitter online arguments about whether Norwegian timber tariffs of the 1800s ruined Chicago deep dish forever. The chaotic tales, blending dystopia and the grotesque, offer sharp humor and biting commentary, leaving readers grappling with questions of meaning, choice, and the absurdity of existence.

A biting critique of consumer culture, decision fatigue, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Decision Paralysis is both a satire and a deep dive into the human psyche. Fans of sardonic humor, speculative fiction, and offbeat storytelling will find much to enjoy in Konrath’s latest offering, which deftly combines outrageous comedy with an undercurrent of raw, philosophical truth. This is a book that will leave readers laughing, thinking, and questioning their own paths through the maze of modern existence.

The cover: it’s from Van Damme Beach just south of Mendocino. Failure Cascade‘s cover was shot on the same 2017 trip, about three miles north. It was a color image that was filtered down to black and white; this image is color, but looks almost monochromatic. I love when a photo ends up like that.

Anyway, that’s that. I hope you check it out. I am not sure what’s next, but I have a list of stuff to do, and two big books past the first draft stage, so we’ll see what 2025 brings.

Categories
general

Vol.13, Revisited

Vol.13 rides again. I’ve revisited and republished my 13th book from 2016.

Let’s cut to the chase with the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4e81lyi

For those who don’t remember, this was a book of 20 short stories and flash fiction pieces. It included two things that were in other zines, and three stories that were in my own zine, Mandatory Laxative #14.

Let’s ask the KonGPT what it was about:

Vol. 13 by Jon Konrath is an eclectic, absurdist work that blends surreal humor with societal satire. The collection of short stories and essays addresses a wide array of random yet often connected topics, including pop culture, existential musings, and sharp critiques of consumerism and modern life. With chapter titles like “Mariah Carey Is Punk as Fuck” and “The Kansas City Tofu Firebombing,” the content explores bizarre scenarios filled with dark humor. The chaotic narrative jumps from one vignette to the next, portraying a disjointed, almost hallucinogenic journey through a world where everything is skewed to the point of absurdity.

Konrath’s writing style is frenetic, with a voice that mixes cynicism and wit while layering in cultural references ranging from fast food chains to forgotten celebrities. The underlying tone is rebellious, subversive, and at times grotesque, capturing the disillusionment with American culture in the early 21st century. The stories invite the reader to experience a twisted version of reality where logic breaks down, leaving behind a vivid, often unsettling commentary on the absurdities of daily life .

As I did with The Failure Cascade and Book of Dreams, this re-visit involved a quick edit to fix minor typos. If you already own the book, you’re not getting any new content here, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some questionable use of commas quashed. This publication was mostly a long-tail effort to get old writing back out there.

The original cover was a play on the Black Sabbath album Vol.4. Back in 2016, I labored to get the font and the look of it right. The curse was the use of “The Picture” which seemed like a good idea at the time, the height of that dumb meme. I won’t get into the exact details, but that meme is dead and I’m scrubbing it from everything possible. There was something great about having a piece of branding like that, but it also very firmly painted me in a corner persona-wise, and I’m happy to abandon it. I like the new cover a lot, and it was neat to make. Finding an icon for each story was a fun project. Is it weird to have this book sort of named after the Black Sabbath album and not have the cover? Whatever.

I previously said I like Book of Dreams like 95% and Failure Cascade maybe 75%. I would honestly say I like Vol.13 maybe 80%. There are a few cringe bits here, and I do fall into some of the same Konrath tropes that I repeat far too much. (Me and Fat Mike go to the 7-Eleven; someone babbling about something at a fast-food restaurant; I’m at a Kroger talking to some weirdo; a military strike in everyday life.) There are certain callbacks that I used to make as part of my “brand” that have been driven into the ground that I can’t erase: Mariah Carey, Lunchables, NyQuil, etc. I’m done (or trying to be done) with writing like that, but I can’t erase all of it.

There are some stories in here that I absolutely love. “The Metaphor of Poundcake” is one of my favorite stories ever, and has two threads that weave together perfectly. “#JustKilldozerThings” has some absolutely fabulous lines and exchanges in it. While most of my flash fiction hovers around 1000 words in this era, there are a lot of stories that stretch out for two or three times that. It’s similar to Failure Cascade (and my next book) in that the stories almost get too long to be flash, but still feel like exactly the right balance between punchiness and story.

Anyway, there it is. Now, on to the next one.

Categories
general

KONCAST Episode 10: Ryan Werner

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-10-ryan-werner

In this episode, I talk to writer, publisher, musician, and lunch lady Ryan Werner. He is the author of Shake Away These Constant Days, Murmuration, If There’s Any Truth In a Northbound Train, and Soft. He plays guitar in Young Indian and numerous other bands. He also runs Passenger Side books.

Links from this episode:

http://www.ryanwernerwritesstuff.com

https://ryanwerner.bandcamp.com

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-10-ryan-werner

Categories
general

KONCAST Episode 9: Timothy Gager

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-9-timothy-gager

In this episode, I talk to writer and poet Timothy Gager. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction, including his latest book of poetry, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real. He’s also the host of the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Links from this episode:

Timothy Gager: http://www.timothygager.com

The Dire Reader Series: http://www.direreader.com

Chief Jay Strongbow is Real: http://amzn.to/2zuBVaN

http://lithub.com/the-literary-class-system-is-impoverishing-literature/

The RCA eBook reader: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/REB_1100
Click here to for more details on this new episode of The Koncast

Categories
general

Print Obsessions

I’ve been obsessed with print lately, which is a real kick in the ass, because I sell almost no print books these days.  I can sometimes get a few people to kick in a buck to look at my stuff on the kindle, but sales of the dead tree counterparts have been absolutely abysmal.  If it wasn’t for the kindle, I’d probably be learning to crochet instead of still picking at this, so that’s a good thing, and I really do like it when people read my books regardless of price or format.  But there’s something about print books that really pulls at me.

I just read this book the other day, by RE/Search, which was essentially a two-hour phone interview of Henry Rollins by V. Vale.  Rollins had some good stuff to say, and it’s always fun to catch up with his projects.  But one of the things that made me really love this project was that it was a pocket book, a little 4×6 inch book, maybe 125 pages, but a little thing that felt good in your hands and just screamed “collectible” even if it was not an ultra-rare numbered limited edition.  There’s a certain tactile pleasure in having a book like this, and I don’t know what it is.  It’s small, and an odd size, not like the usual trade paperback.  Maybe it’s because it reminds me of a diary or a little book you’d get as a kid.  Maybe it’s the fact that it could go in a pocket easily, although I didn’t take it out of the house or bring it on the go with me.  But something about it made me appreciate it more than if it was an industry standard 5.06×7.81″ book.  It’s the reason I made the print version of Fistful of Pizza the size it is, although only a couple of you actually have a print version.  (The kindle strikes again!)

There are some issues with doing a perfect little book like this.  Lulu has a pocket size, which is 4.25×6.87.  The problem is that it’s Lulu, which means fulfillment is just a little bit off, and price is higher.  Createspace supposedly does custom trim sizes as small as 4×6″, although custom sizes are only available from amazon.com (which is fine – it’s not like a brick and mortar shop is custom-ordering my books.)  The only issue with that is POD books are always priced per page, regardless of their size.  So if you had a 40,000-word manuscript and you put it in a pocket book, it’s going to cost way more per copy than a 6×9″ book with the same font size, since there are going to be more pages in the pocket book due to fewer words per page.

Another thing I wish you could do is have some pages color, and some black and white.  You can make a whole book color, but for a hundred-page book, you’d have to make it $13.99 to break even.  (You can make a hundred-page black and white book $3.99 and you’d still make a quarter per book.)  I would love to have a book that had eight color plates in the middle, but the rest black and white, but that’s not possible with print on demand.

I don’t even have ideas or projects for this crap; I just think of sizes and colors and formats and wish I could do something with them.  Like, I’d love to do either a DVD or a CD that was encased in a book.  I don’t know what I’d put on them — maybe some kind of spoken word experimental garbage.  Createspace has POD CD and DVD offerings, but they don’t have books or booklets.  It doesn’t matter, because I don’t know how to record a book on tape that doesn’t sound like hell, and I don’t know what I’d add to a book in color, other than pictures of my cat or something.  But it always has me thinking.

 

Categories
general

Goodbye, iUniverse

My first royalty check

No, iUniverse isn’t going out of business.   (Well, maybe they are – I haven’t checked.)  I’ve just decided to pull my books from iUniverse.

I’ve done three books with them, and the idea of print on demand radically changed my writing career.  I mean, I have not made millions from it, but prior to the advent of PoD, I thought the only way I’d ever hold a printed copy of my book in my hands would be if I wrote a million agents and publishers and found one willing to print it, or if I payed thousands of dollars to fill my garage with a short print run, or maybe if I went to Kinko’s and printed my own copy.

Someone told me about iUniverse back in 99 or 2000, and this was around the time Summer Rain was close to done.  It was an incredibly revolutionary idea back then, this thought that I could get real copies of my book, and get them in Amazon and other book stores, and even have it so brick-and-mortar book stores (remember those?) could order copies through Ingram.

There were a couple of issues with PoD back then.  One was cost.  Summer Rain was incredibly expensive compared to the per-unit cost of offset printing a few thousand books.  There wasn’t the setup, and you didn’t have to produce a bunch of books at once and then warehouse them, which was awesome.  But selling a paperback book for thirty bucks was never easy.

The stigma was the worst part.  Back in 2000, everyone looked down at PoD as hackneyed and just another extension of vanity presses.  The party line was that real writers don’t self-publish, and you weren’t shit unless you had a book deal.  The irony of this is that the proponents of this attitude are the same people who can’t shut the fuck up about the kindle revolution.  (You know who I’m talking about.)  To some extent, this didn’t matter to me; I had a copy of my book on my shelf at home, and friends could buy it and read it, and people enjoyed the work.  That’s all that ultimately matters to me, but there was still a nagging feeling in the back of my head when the “real” writers talked shit about self-publishing.

I also didn’t have high hopes that PoD publishing would reap all of the rewards that getting a book deal with a Big 6 publisher would.  There was a lot of PoD backlash from people who dumped a book onto a PoD publisher, and then bitched and moaned when it didn’t take off.  I never saw iUniverse as anything more than a printer, and didn’t expect them to do anything more than fulfillment.  But some people thought you would just upload your PDF and your book would suddenly take off like a Dan Brown release.  Truth is, PoD involves just as much hustle as printing off copies yourself and trying to sell them one by one.

So, why am I dumping iUniverse?  A few reasons:

  • When I first started, there was almost no initial setup fees – I may have paid some trivial amount, like a hundred bucks, but it wasn’t much.  This fee went up and up, and after my third book, Lulu came on the scene with no setup fee, and that was the end of the line for me and iUniverse.  Now, their most basic package is $899, and the “Book Launch Premier Pro” is a whopping $4499.
  • All I really wanted was fulfillment and distribution.  iUniverse tried to differentiate themselves with all of this “value add” stuff that was mostly useless.  I have no need for bookmarks, press releases, book signing kits, or other crap I could get online for a dollar.  (Vistaprint is your friend.)
  • Without asking, iUniverse decided they would create e-book versions of my books and price them the way they wanted to price them.  And they made it damn near impossible to remove those versions.  So while I made a new version of Rumored to Exist for the kindle and priced it at $2.99, they made a crappy version and priced it at $3.99.
  • The per-unit pricing was too high.  Summer Rain was $29.99 on iUniverse.  The lulu version was $14.99.  The createspace version will be $13.99.  My profit is roughly the same on all three.
  • All of the processes at iUniverse are antiquated.  To find out your royalties, you have to wait for the next month’s statement.  To pull a book from publishing, you have to write them a god damned letter.  Ugh.
  • One of the things iUniverse had over createspace was that createspace is part of Amazon, which meant you wouldn’t get into B&N or brick-and-mortar stores.  With iUniverse, you could get into anyplace that used Ingram’s database.  In practice, 99.99999% of my book sales are through Amazon.  I don’t know if I’ve ever sold a book through a brick-and-mortar store.

So I wrote a letter to iUniverse and pulled my books.  (Seriously, a letter?)  There are currently only three books on there: Summer Rain, Rumored, and Tell Me a Story About the Devil, which is a journal archive from 97-99 that none of you ever bought.  The first two are already moved to Amazon/createspace.  The last one can die on the vine.  If you’re really desperate to get any of the iUniverse editions before they go away, I think you probably have a few days to grab them.  But the newer versions are not only better, but cheaper.

Next up will be hemming and hawing about what to do with all of my books on lulu, and if they should also get moved.  I should probably stop screwing with all of this and actually write new books, though.

Categories
general

Random bitching about Lulu, and why print is dead

I am publishing a book of short stories momentarily.  [Edit: I just did.  Go here to check it out.] The initial thought was to pull together a bunch of the stories I’d published elsewhere, and make a nice little 99 cent download on the Kindle.  And I’d make that a free download on the Kindle, but you can only do that if you’re a publisher, and even though Bowker thinks I’m a publisher, Amazon doesn’t.  Fair enough.  But I also have this strange affinity for dead trees, and I gauge my success as a writer by the number of books on the Konrath shelf of my library, so I wanted another volume in there.  Also, enough luddite contrarians have bitched about my last eBook release that I thought I’d throw you all a bone and do a print version, too.

So I just switched to using Lightning Source for print-on-demand.  But that costs money in setup fees, and I didn’t want to pay a ton up front and then have to spend the next three months hustling copies to break even, especially if the print edition wasn’t my target in the first place.  So I decided to go back to lulu for this one.  And man, I forgot how much I hate lulu.

Here’s a list of the various annoyances I had putting this one together:

  • First of all, Lulu’s web site sucks.  It took me roughly 20,000 clicks to find out how their ISBN/distribution options worked, and each page load takes as much time as it took me to download those Cindy Crawford Playboy GIFs back in 1996 on my 14.4Kbps modem.  They could solve all of this with the one-two punch of some content delivery network like Akamai and a real CMS like Jive.  But they won’t.
  • There’s always the decision between a one-piece and a three-piece cover.  Their new three-piece cover wizard is garbage, but they’re honest enough to almost cop to this and give you the option of using their old wizard.  With that, you can just upload PNGs of the front and the back cover and be done with it.  What you can’t do is upload an image of the spine, which means you’re stuck with their fonts on the spine, and you can’t do something like put your publisher logo on there.  I get it, the spine thickness varies, but you know the number of pages and thickness, so why not just tell me, “upload an image that’s x by y pixels” and let me do it?  So I decided to do a one-piece cover, which I’ve never done before with Lulu.
  • If you do a three-piece cover, they give you templates for the front and back cover, and they have guides for the bleed and trim and usable space and all that jazz.  If you do a one-piece cover, they give you vague instructions of what pixel rows and columns these are.  So yeah, I took 9th grade geometry and can figure this out, but it would be much nicer to have a solid PSD template with all of this predefined to make sure I don’t screw it up.
  • There are two fundamental changes in this book over the others I’ve done on Lulu: I’m using Scrivener for the source, and I’m doing a pocket book, which is an oddball size, or at least not 6×9.  And I struggled on how to get this laid out correctly.  I normally would use FrameMaker to belt out a 6×9 book, and maybe export the Scrivener into RTF and paste it in and go.  So I designed a 4.25″ x 6.88″ book in Frame, but could not figure out a way to get the Scrivener-generated RTF into Frame without losing all of the character-level markup, like italics and bold.  The problem is, Scrivener doesn’t export those as character styles, they do it as font property changes.  So when I exported, pasted, and changed the fonts, I lost all of the character style stuff.  Which means I had to, ugh, I don’t even want to say it…
  • I ended up using Word to lay out the inside of the book.  Word is not a publishing platform; anything longer and more complex than a grocery list in Word quickly becomes a world of hurt.  But lulu has a template for Word for their pocket book format, so after some gymnastics with pasting the Scrivener RTF into a third Word document to knock it down and strip out half of the font stuff, I got it into Word.  I then spent the next seven hours trying to figure out how the hell to get the page numbering and section breaks and paragraph styles and everything else to behave.
  • There’s also this issue that Mac-produced PDF may or may not work with Lulu.  Of course, there’s no information about this on the Lulu site, or if there is, it’s buried and mixed together with out-of-date information from 2004.  You can do a google search on it, but the top hits are wives’ tales from a half-decade ago, and very little solid information.  The Mac uses Quartz to produce PDF natively, and not Acrobat.  So it might embed fonts correctly, it might not.  And I’m using a weird font for headings, so that’s a big deal to me.
  • A site told me to download the actual capital-a Acrobat reader from Adobe, uncheck the “use local fonts” option, and look to see if all of my special fonts suddenly looked like Klingon.  They didn’t.  But, and this is much worse, I had to install an Adobe product on my system.  This means that even though I checked the box that said “DO NOT INSTALL THIS SHIT IN MY BROWSER YOU DOUCHEBAG”, the next time I opened up a PDF in Safari, it sat for a long Adobe minute, churned and beachballed, and I got the ugly Adobe bar and crap display.  And of course, now every time I get up from my computer to get a drink of water and come back, there’s a notice on my screen asking if I want to install the latest Acrobat update.
  • Okay, so now I’ve got a one-piece cover and a PDF.  I go to lulu, upload everything, and step one of the wizard says “do you want an ISBN?  you can totally add it later if you like.”  And I say no, add it later.  Rookie mistake.
  • I get all the crap in, and then order a proof copy.  $7.50 for a 150 page book; it would have been $2.85 to order it on Lightning Source.  But Lightning Source has the setup fees.  And they don’t have that wonderful cover wizard I avoided like the plague.
  • The worst part is $3.99 shipping on a $7.50 book for the slow-boat-to-China USPS shipping.  Amazon Prime has spoiled me.
  • So then I decide to add that ISBN like I mentioned.  One click done, right?  No.  There’s no option.  There’s no help.  There’s nothing, and I finally just say fuck it and delete the whole thing and start over to see why it won’t let me add it.
  • Turns out that if you do a one-piece cover, you have to select that ISBN option, download a bar code, and add it to your cover; it will only overlay the bar code if you did your cover with the wizard.  Fine, I’ll download it and add it.
  • I download the PDF of the bar code block.  Lulu insists on 300 dpi covers, which is par for the course, but this PDF is 72 dpi.  If you import it into a bitmap editing program like Pixelmator and jack it up to 300 dpi, it becomes all blurry.  I thought about just leaving it like that because, seriously, every brick and mortar bookstore with a scanner is going to be out of business by the time I get to step 5 of the wizard.  But I play nice and spend an hour fucking with this thing until I realize that GIMP handles EPS natively and let me easily blow up the size without distortion.  I think Photoshop does that too, but until one of you pals of mine with an educational discount sends me a $5 copy of CS5 for the Mac in exchange for a bunch of books in trade (hint), I don’t have Photoshop.
  • Click, click, click, and we get to pricing.  Um.  To make a long story short, I had to price the book at $12.49 retail so Lulu could pay the Amazon tax, then set a 30% discount on Lulu.  That means if you buy the book on Lulu (which nobody ever does, because of their shipping and that involves three clicks instead of one), it’s $8.74.  On Amazon, $12.49.  On Kindle, $.99.  BUT WHAT IF YOU DROP YOUR KINDLE IN THE BATHTUB?  WHAT IF YOU WANT TO BUY A USED COPY OF A BOOK?  WHAT IF BLAH BLAH DRM GEORGE ORWELL AMAZON IS HITLER GLGLGLGLGLGL.
  • I then had to order a second proof, so another $11.49 there.

OK, end of bitchfest.  More details on the book when I get a proof in the pony express mail, which will be in 5-244 days.

[Note: The book is done.  It’s called A Fistful of Pizza, so go read about it and check it out!]