One way, according to Lulu.com, was to use their services to create an ePub version of your book for you, now for a limited time at 50% off!

I was excited to see this, until I saw the price. It was about $350. Even at half off, my time isn't worth that much.

But the blog post on Lulu said that there were many free options for creating ePub books, so I looked into them. I found a program called Calibre that was available for Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux.

At first I thought I could just import the PDF that I had created from Lulu, but that didn't work too well--the result had the page numbers smushed directly into the main text, didn't have chapter dividers, and generally looked ugly.

There was talk of some macros for Microsoft Word that would create an ePub-friendly document for importing, but here I ran into the horrible truth that Word 2008 for Macintosh does not support Visual Basic macros! I thought about trying it on my PC, but they suggested a different solution.

Word has a Save As HTML feature. It creates horrible code and everybody hates it, but here I thought it just might work. The Calibre documentation suggested using the "Save as Web page (filtered)" which creates much cleaner code, but it seemed like the Macintosh version of Word didn't have this feature! I turns out that it is just labeled a little differently in the Mac version. You select "Save as Web Page (.htm)" and then select "Save only display information into HTML".

The result is an .HTM file that can be imported into Calibre and produces a perfect ePub book, suitable for uploading to Lulu.

Who would have thought that Word's Save As HTML would be actually useful? Well, me, as it turns out. I once used that feature to create a single-sourced HTML Help document from a 100-page Word manual, but that involved some custom programming and is a completely different story. I'll tell that one another time.

Here is the link for the ePub version again: http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/edge-of-infinity/8519263

Lulu is a fantastic way for authors to publish books, in both physical and electronic formats. By default, Lulu lets you create a paperback version of your novel and also offers an electronic version in PDF format. I don't mind which one people download, as I make approximately the same amount of money for each one.

So I was a bit surprised to see a message in my Inbox from Lulu about an iPad giveaway contest. An iPad giveaway? I want one! And all you have to do is create an ePub book on their site!

So what is an ePub, anyway, and why would I want one when I already had a PDF available?

The PDF, while great for viewing on a computer, isn't quite suitable for other electronic readers, such as the iPad, the Kindle, or even the iPhone or iPod Touch. Why? Because it is a simulation of a physical paper object: each paper page is represented by an electronic page. You can zoom in and out, but then the whole page might not fit on your screen, and you'll have to swipe back and forth to read each line. If you have a small screen, like an iPhone, the text will be too small to read!

Enter ePub, an open format that preserves the information about which physical page you might be on but allows the text to reflow to fit any size screen. Thus, a "page" is just something that happens to fit on the screen you are viewing right now, at the font size you chose.

ePub books can have DRM, but they don't have to. I chose to go completely DRM-free.

Here is the result:

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/edge-of-infinity/8519263

I'll talk about how I created the ePub version in my next post.

Thanks to my best friend Terry, my novel Edge of Infinity has taken its first steps into the retail world.

He is good friends with Walter, the owner and proprietor of White Dwarf Books, the best place to go for fantasy and science fiction and a fixture of the Vancouver landscape since 1978. This made it easy for me to stroll right in off the street and drop off a few copies on consignment. Here’s Walter at the cash register, entering my book into the database!

I signed all the copies, and left elated and excited. They set the price at $12.95, and thanks to my bulk discount order, this actually means I almost break even on my costs, which I never even expected—I was banking on losing some money just for the promotional value. Theoretically, if I increased the volume of my orders I could start to make a tiny profit, but I’m still a ways away from thinking in those terms. It’s just a few copies for now, but if even one of them gets sold then that’s one more person that I’ve been able to reach with my fiction writing. Small steps, I keep thinking. Small steps.

So head on down to White Dwarf books at 3715 West Tenth Ave, the exclusive retail distributor of Edge of Infinity, and pick up a signed copy!

Terry, meanwhile, wants me to get busy writing the sequel, and make it even better than the original. I’m all over that!

The second banner ad

This is my first attempt at creating a banner ad for Edge of Infinity, my science-fiction novel.

I was just getting ready to go out when my wife noticed a single typo in my novel manuscript.

One of the great advantages of print-on-demand publishing is that any mistakes can quickly be corrected, and all future copies of the book will be free of that error. Sure, it was just one word, but since it was so easy to fix…

So I signed on to my account at Lulu.com to upload the revised manuscript. To create a new revision requires running through the content creation wizard, which gives you an opportunity to revise all the little decisions you had to make the first time. One of the very first options is how you want your book to be made available to the public. You can either keep the book at Lulu, or make it available in other bookstores. The latter option allows you to add an ISBN to your title.

That was my mistake.

Suddenly my head was full of these crazy dreams of having a “real” ISBN, of being a “real” author, of having my book sold on Amazon and in retail bookstores worldwide. Sure, I’d still have to do all my own promotion, but the sting of self-publishing would be mitigated by the fact that my novel would be available from all these “respectable” outlets. Lulu automatically creates your ISBN and adds it to the back of your book cover, so by the time I got to the end of the wizard I was really excited.
Then, at the final step, my heart fell. The price of my paperback had suddenly jumped from an affordable $13 to an exorbitant $24. I tried to fix this, but Lulu wouldn’t let me. Something was wrong. I had to read the pricing FAQs, something I should have done before I started any of this.

It turns out that once you add that ISBN and make the book available through other retail outlets, they are going to want two things: one, a fifty percent markup on the publisher’s price, and two, a guarantee that no other outlet can sell the book for less than the price they are setting. So it turns Lulu from the one-stop printing, publishing, and sales house to becoming a middleman, a publisher that delivers books to other stores. This makes sense: retailers aren’t going to want to sell something they have never heard of unless they get a generous markup, and they won’t let Lulu sell the book for their cost on their own site if they do so. So, suitably chastened, I went through the wizard again to try and remove the ISBN.

Only I couldn’t.

Now, we were already running late, and I started to panic. Why couldn’t I remove this ISBN? It was like a bloody mark of Cain on my novel now, I wanted it out, and out now! I don’t care about a stupid number, but I care very much if my book is suddenly twice as expensive! Damn it, how do I change this?

Back to reading the FAQs again, and it turns out that once a book is made available for wider distribution, it can’t be taken off that list. The only way around this is to “retire” the manuscript, making it unavailable either on Lulu or anywhere else. I did this, then created a new project with the same title and no nasty ISBN. This worked, but the mark of Cain hung around me still. Whenever I searched for my name or book title on Lulu, it would find my old, retired project, which brought up the message “This item is no longer available.” I sent a ticket in using Lulu’s support form, but I haven’t heard back from them yet.

All for one word. One word.

The good news is that the resurrected novel with its new URL link works perfectly well, and multiple people have ordered the book at the proper price and received it without hassle. I personally ordered ten copies to give away to family and friends, and I’ve even sold some of them. But I’m still kicking myself for getting sucked into the siren song of the ISBN.

I am proud to announce the general availability of my first novel, a science fiction work titled Edge of Infinity. You can order it here:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/edge-of-infinity/7777641

It is available in paperback ($13.37) and DRM-free PDF ($2.99) versions.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible!

My Science Fiction