Happy Publishing Day!

Sinking Moon Press has officially published its first book, The Kunlun Secret, which I edited, available on Amazon.com right now:

I thought it would be useful to add a couple of notes on the process we went through when publishing this - some "lessons learned," if you will. I didn't start out to form a publishing company, but when this opportunity presented itself, I thought it might be a good way to organically grow some funding for the Sinking Moon Foundation, a 501c(3) non-profit.

I approached this from an author's perspective. That is, I asked myself the question "What is the biggest obstacle to authors getting their work out in the world?" Anyone can self-publish, which, in a sense, is exactly what Sinking Moon Press is starting out as - a glorified self-publishing organization. Some things a first-time author might not know about this process, though, caught me off guard:

1. There really isn't a great way to format your book in the formats that are necessary for Amazon to show it with all its features on your Kindle
   Amazon doesn't really use epub formats. You can send an epub to your Kindle, but it won't have a cover. Further, a number of the nice things besides the text will be removed. This is unfortunate, because epub is a standard, and is thus interchangeable between multiple e-readers, as well as mobile phones. Amazon actually uses a proprietary format called azw, which epub books are converted to before being sent to a Kindle device.
2. Cover art is cheap, but only if you don't want original stuff
   Fiverr is a great place to get a cover designed, but if you look at the notes for most of those cover designs, they often come with multiple "licensed stock images," which means the author uses a photo and mocks it up in the way you want. I didn't realize until I started looking at book covers how many authors now use this format - take an image of a person, make them look like they're engaged in some magical or sci-fi activity, add a generic background and some stylized text on top of it, and it's a book cover. I don't mind these covers, I just think they are a little too "cookie cutter" for me, personally.
   
   We took a different route - utilizing a watercolor painting, digitally editing it to make it represent the right central idea we're focusing on with the book, and then adding stylized text on top of it. Now that I look at it again, it looks somewhat plain, to be honest, but it was a learning experience that I enjoyed.
3. Adding the "extra" stuff to a book, like Author's Notes, Preface, Copyright Pages, Acknowledgements, and Afterword, isn't as easy as one would like
   This sort of comes along the same lines as formatting, above, but one thing that bit us was that adding text in tables, adding images, adding footnotes, and specific font formatting, wasn't really supported in Amazon's Kindle format. (That is, unless we gave up the reflowability of our text, which, of course, was a no-go). Adding specific fonts to the book wasn't really supported, either. Getting things to be aligned exactly was a pretty big chore, to be honest, and seems like a technical problem in need of solution.

All in all, I would say that the writing of the book was probably only about half of the work necessary to get it to this point. All of the "extra" stuff was just as much work. I could see someone who is less technical than I am having a ton of difficulty with some of these things, and it's only because I've worked in text flow for the web that I understand some of the reasons why things are the way they are (and how to get around them with some grace).

As such, we decided to create a (very) small publishing company - Sinking Moon Press - to hopefully help authors with some of these issues. If you're interested in publishing a book with us, shoot me an email at scottj@sinkingmoon.com and maybe we can work together to get your book out into the world!