Indie publishing is harder than it looks...

New issues keep cropping up when you indie publish. Here's an example.

We donated a paperback version of Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey to our local library, but we couldn't find it on the shelf. It turns out that because it's a paperback, it was shoved into a paperback carousel. It's humorous, realistic contemporary children's fiction, but it was jammed into the fantasy carousel. And when I say shoved and jammed, I mean it. The book had been damaged because it didn't quite fit. It was just a bit too tall.

There are two things we learned from this.

First, write the genre on the back cover or the spine. This makes it easier for librarians to know where to put it.

Second, don't make your paperback any bigger than 5.25" wide by 8" high. It's okay to make a hardcover book bigger, but paperbacks are likely to be put on carousels, and they will get damaged if they're any bigger than that.

Now I need to reformat the paperback of Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey to the right dimensions, and I should resubmit the cover so that it says "children's humorous fiction" on the back. I'll probably readjust the price so that I can sell it in more markets. (Createspace gives a different royalty for each market, and the price I gave the book made it only available through Createspace and Amazon.)

We're also having a hard time working things out for Lightning Source so we can get hardcover editions of Dan Quixote and Toren the Teller's Tale, but that's a whole other issue.