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Mars Will Send No More

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Mars Will Send No More

Tag Archives: singing spell

KDP: Hardcover Beta Review

05 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in writing

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hardcover, KDP, meteor mags, self publishing, singing spell, writing

In case you missed my post from last month, I was invited by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to participate in the beta version of their new program for producing print-on-demand hardcover books. I promised you an update when the first, physical proof arrived. Guess what came in the mail today!

All I can say is that the book looks and feels amazing. It’s sturdy and way more substantial than I expected for a smallish 150-page book. The print options I chose were for white paper and a gloss finish on the cover.

Some folks believe you should use cream paper for fiction, but I have produced books in both cream and white, and the white paper looks and feels better to me. I also find the high contrast with black text makes white paper easier to read. I’ve produced books with both matte and glossy covers, and I tend to prefer the shiny gloss that really makes the colors vibrant. But matte finish is also nice, and I’ve gone with that several times when it felt right.

The binding is beautiful inside and out, and I love the way that about a quarter-inch of the cover color and design is visible inside the book when opened, where the cover wraps around the edges.

I think authors will be pleased when this hardcover option is available to everyone. I already feel the urge to make hardcover editions of about half a dozen of my books. I’d love to release the first Meteor Mags Omnibus in hardcover, but at more than 580 pages, it exceeds the maximum page count of 550 for a KDP hardcover.

Besides page count, authors will want to consider price points and profit margins. My paperback edition of The Singing Spell has a wholesale printing cost to me of less than USD $3. But the printing cost for the hardcover is $7.28. (Again, this is for a 150-page book. Longer books will cost more.) To sell the hardcover and make a reasonable per-unit profit on Amazon, I needed to price it at $14.95, as opposed to the $6.95 price for the paperback and the $2.99 bargain price for the Kindle ebook edition.

This doesn’t make much of a financial difference to me, since I design my own books, but authors who need to pay a designer to format the cover for a hardcover edition will want to consider whether they can recoup the additional expense with hardcover sales at a higher price than the other editions. Will their target market be willing to spend the extra bucks for a hardcover? It’s a question I can’t really answer for anyone without market research.

Either way, I expect my fellow authors and readers will be impressed with the quality of these hardcover editions, and I’m looking forward to the day when this program is no longer in beta testing but available to all self-publishers using the KDP platform.

Update: The hardcover edition of The Singing Spell is now available on Amazon.

seven short poems

10 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in poetry

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Tags

meteor mags, poems, poetry, singing spell, writing

These seven seven-line poems go with the short story The Singing Spell. The subjects relate to the story, and the first letters of each line spell out the poem’s title. It’s not a form I usually work in, but I thought it would be fun to try something different. Update: These poems now appear in the collection Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.

PATCHES

Pressed close to the ground,
a solitary huntress hungers
to taste what scurries and forages unaware.

Calico colors—brown, black, and white—
hide her in the sun-dappled forest floor.

Everything comes down to
survival.

BILLION

Before history,
I knew you
like a light or a
lyric or the
iridescence of a hummingbird.

Only now,
nothing separates us.

NEBULAE

Nurseries of infant stars,
expectant giants and
black holes hungering for birth,
ushered into a theater of
light and violent gravity where
all who ever lived await
eternity’s epilogue.

MINERAL

Maybe next time,
I come back a stone.
Nowhere to go or
escape, just
rock.

Alabaster.
Limestone.

SERPENT

Sometimes you need to shed
everything to find the
right skin.

Pent-up explosions
emerge as something new.

No one ever mourned
the cell she escaped.

FORTUNE

Fate remains silent,
only speaking in unsolved mysteries.

Road signs vanish, and
travelers lose their way
until that unexpected
night, when
everything at last makes sense.

HIGHWAY

How we got here
is less important than why.

Go as far as your
heart can take you, and
when you reach the
arid edge of time,
you will find me.

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