From December 5, 2016:
Saturday I went to look up my book sales as I do about thirty times a day and noticed the sales graph was a little different:
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| Click to embiggen as Offutt would say |
In case you don't notice, I circled what they added: a third line for your paperback sales. Which as you can see, my line is flat because I hardly ever sell paperbacks.
When I went to the dashboard I saw they had added more stuff for paperbacks:
Basically what they're doing is combining your KDP dashboard with CreateSpace, probably because they think it'll make it easier for people to create paperbacks and help with their master plan to dethrone and demolish all traditional publishing. (Mwahahahaha)
It's pretty similar to what you can already do on Draft2Digital. I don't know about B&N since I haven't actually published a book there in a long time. Anyway, you can just click the link to "create paperback." As you can see with Choose Your Own Gender Omnibus I actually clicked it to see how it worked.
With Draft2Digital it takes your ebook file and converts it into a PDF that isn't exactly perfect formatting but isn't terrible; I actually used that for a couple of Transformed series books I published through CreateSpace. But of course Amazon can't do that. Instead, they still want you to create your own interior file like you do with CreateSpace.
Which made me snort and say, "What's the fucking point then?" Why merge the platforms if I still have to do all the fucking work of making the fucking book? I mean you have the ebook file already loaded, so why can't you just convert it automatically like Draft2Digital does?
Yes I'm lazy that way. Formatting paperbacks is annoying, which is part of the reason I don't have more of them. The lack of sales is the more important reason though. So I can't imagine I'd have much use for this in the future, but other writers might.
It's still a "beta feature" so if you use KDP and don't see this yet then I guess you just weren't special enough for the beta, but eventually it will be coming. For all the good it will do you.
1 comment:
In the book "Leviathan Wakes" do you remember the scene where Holden saw a guy was reading a paperback book, and he remarked to himself, "Wow...what a way to show your privilege by having only 100 Megbytes of data in a format that takes up so much space and weighs so much." I thought that was an interesting way to think of a book. Paperback books are a luxury these days, and luxury oftentimes means "pain in the butt."
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