Scene of the crime

This is a covered hopper car. Covered hoppers provide the scenes of the crime in the next Steve Martinez novel, Tracking the Beast, coming in December.

Now why would covered hopper cars be useful to a serial killer? You'll just have to wait to find out.

Meanwhile, I am buying that hopper car above to use in library and bookstore presentations. It's a G scale model, about two feet long. That ought to be useful for an author with murder on his mind.

Print-on-demand, continued

The experience using CreateSpace, Amazon.com's online self-publishing software for paperback books, to produce an omnibus version of my first three Steve Martinez novels was so satisfactory that I decided to give it a go again with Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, my 1994 nonfiction book.

Month in and month out, Zephyr is the best performing of all my ebooks so far as sales are concerned. It stands to reason that a print-on-demand paperback edition might do well enough at the cash register to be worth all the painstaking and sweaty work getting it ready.

And so, after another transcontinental trip on that train earlier this month, I updated the 2012 ebook edition with some new facts, new observations and new photographs. The Kindle and Nook ebook versions are now online, and the print-on-demand paperback will go live on Amazon.com and its allied outlets within a few days.

Print-on-demand

Yesterday a print-on-demand paperback of Porcupine County, the omnibus edition that gathers in one volume the first three Steve Martinez novels, went on sale on Amazon.com for $25.95 list. That's steep, but Amazon's POD entity, CreateSpace, insists on setting mandatory prices according to the number of pages in a book—and Porcupine County checks in at a hefty 768 pages.

This is a bit of an experiment to see how do-it-yourself print-on-demand works. Amazon.com and its allied outlets don't have to carry a large number of copies in inventory—nor does the author if he wants to hand-sell the book— but can just print new ones to order. That saves warehouse space and nobody gets caught with a lot of unsold inventory.

I decided to go with a cover different from the ebook version simply because it was easier to use CreateSpace's electronic templates rather than to puzzle out how to transfer the ebook cover design.

At 2.8 pounds the finished paperback seems awfully thick and heavy. After a while I'll redo the text with 10 point Book Antiqua rather than the present 12 points in the same font. That will likely shrink those 768 pages down to fewer than 600 and will also result in a sharp drop in poundage and list price, probably to $22.95.

Putting the book together was a lot of sweaty busywork. I downloaded a 6 x 9 template from CreateSpace and poured the electronic manuscript into it, then tweaked it for upload. The problem here is that the template doesn't quite forecast accurately how CreateSpace will actually format the text once it's uploaded. The book ended up at ten pages longer than the template said it would. Getting it publishable required about six or seven tweaks with the template, then the same number of re-uploads.

I kept trying to get rid of "widows"—those lonely one-word lines at the top of a page—but this was like trying to trap puppies under a rug. Zapping one widow tended to create another on a following page. There is probably an efficient way to de-widow one's electronic text, but I haven't found it yet. And so Porcupine County still contains a few widows.

Otherwise the POD paperback is of surprisingly high quality, with a handsome cover and sharp print in an attractive font on good paper.

Over-all, the experience with CreateSpace wasn't bad at all. It's not only for amateur self-publishing. When a professional author has won the rights back from his original publisher for out-of-print volumes, as I did, he can re-publish the books himself in a new form and extend their earnings.

The royalties from the POD version of Porcupine County, as with those of the ebook version, will all go to the Friends of the Porkies, the civilian auxiliary of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in upper Michigan.

Omnibus

On Amazon.com the other day, I published a new e-book, Porcupine County. Or, rather, three old books in a bespoke new suit. Porcupine County packs the first three Steve Martinez mysteries in one handy e-volume—Season's Revenge, A Venture into Murder, and Cache of Corpses.

Price $9.99. That's a $2 savings off the combined $3.99 for each e-novel.

The purpose is not to squeeze more royalties out of these old books, but to honor the Friends of the Porkies, the nonprofit organization that benefits the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in upper Michigan. (Of course the Porkies are called the Wolverine Mountains in the novels.)

The Friends do good things. They keep the roadsides in the park absolutely immaculate, and police trash on the trails as well. They run a fine Folk School that teaches people folk arts. They sponsor an artist-in-residence program for visiting writers, artists and artisans, putting them up for as many as two weeks in a cabin deep in the woods. Late every August The Friends sponsor the highly successful Porcupine Mountains Music Festival, which draws thousands of people from all over the Midwest. They also provide volunteers for many other activities in the Porkies.

Every nickel from the sales of Porcupine County will go to the Friends. It's tax deductible, of course.

The book is also available in Nook form.