I blogged previously about how long everything seems to take in the business world. Here’s another example, still related to the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon.
While we are using my book as the “guinea pig” to improve the efficiency of indexing so we can lower the price so more of our authors can add an index to their books, we are also working on adding Apple iPad editions for our authors. Ever since the new device was launched early this month, our authors have been clamoring for an option that allows their book to be available on this new digital platform. Who can blame them? The iPad is cool!
So, it stands to reason that I would use Sell Your Book on Amazon to test this new option, too, right. Right, and that’s causing even more delays. Not because of Sell Your Book on Amazon, but because I want to combine these efforts for our conversion specialists, which means giving them more than one title to test at a time. It’s true that Sell Your Book on Amazon is a good test for an ePub format conversion, with its tables and graphics and double margins, etc. And when it is “done” we will use it for a test. But in the meantime, I want to get our specialists on a color book test, also. So, that’s where Adventures in Publishing comes into play, which is my full-color children’s book about how to publish a children’s book.
That sounds easy — it’s just a matter of having them work on the Adventures in Publishing files. But, since we’re about to move this book to new formats, it makes sense to bring it up to date. A few things have changed with our full-color Pearl package since that edition of Adventures in Publishing was written and published. Specifically, the number of color paperback sizes we offer grew from 2 to 5. Additionally, the number of royalty-free illustration packages we offer grew from 15 to 24.
So, right in the middle of trying to wrap up the second edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon, I find myself forced to revise Adventures in Publishing, too, just so we can faciliate some testing for new options while the iron is still hot.
And of course, since we’re exploring other digital formats, its the time to look into making the following platforms available for our authors, too: the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the iPhone via Stanza, etc…
And all these complexities add more delay. The problem with trying to kill two birds with one stone is that sometimes you miss the bird completely…
President of Outskirts Press 