it doesnt detract from a great story Jeff,bring it on…!!!metres or yards!!!
David 
A well written story that brings back all the head-aches I had on fridge work.
Self-publishing is the way to go! I use “Createspace” which is part of Amazon, I’m very pleased how my books turn out [even if they don’t sell].
I see we’re back to double posting again Mr Nut, I nearly did that the other day, it seemed to take for ever to post on a thread, after about 4 minutes I was just about to submit again when it went through.
Interesting comment Chris, I was looking at Createspace as an option, but after getting a phone call form Lulu at 4.30 one morning offering a good deal it’s now looking like they’re the front runners for the time being. What are Createspace like to work with■■?
I bought Garry Hunter’s Trucking Hell a few months back to have a look at how its put together, and although it doesn’t have the feel of paperback from a book shop it was still fairly good quality. I spoke to the the guy at Lulu and asked him about it and he mentioned that there were a few different qualities of paper available and it’s down the the author to stipulate what option they want to go with. It’s a print on demand thing, I ordered on Thursday, and it arrived here in Tasmania the next Tuesday, which I thought was pretty good.
Road trip by Chris Ardon, set in the 1980’s. I’ll order that on pay day.
Jeff
Hi Jeff. Lulu do have different quality papers and prints; it depends on what you need. I was going to use “Lulu Studio” which has brilliant colour photo printing but the cost was horrendous; about $150 per book and nobody would buy that! Createspace did the same book in colour for under $25; but it was disappointing quality pictures and maps. In the end, I withdrew the colour book and republished it in black and white adding a whole lot more stuff. It now sells for $21.95 for 346 pages, 8.5 inches x 8.5 inches. 63,000 words and about 150 maps and photos.
The end product from Createspace is very satisfying; good paper and cover. Their cover-maker is very good and easy to use. You need to follow the uploading instructions very closely when making the PDFs but it is do-able. If something goes wrong, it’s easy enough to change and re-submit the files
and make a second edition. If I buy a box of my books; it takes about 10 days to come from South Carolina to Manitoba.
The good thing about Createspace is the Amazon connection; your book can be on offer in North America and all over Europe with just the click of a mouse. The bad thing about Amazon is that your book will be expensive and your royalties will be small. This is because they like to sometimes offer discounts on the recommended price and also offer free or cheap postage and packaging, which comes out of their large mark-up per-centage. However the royalty cheques do come thru when they should. There is a minimum amount they will send but once over that your ok. My cheques come from the USA and have 30% tax deducted at source. This is easier than getting a tax waiver and then declaring and paying tax on the earnings here in Canada.
I think you have enough material for 4 or 5 books with about 80,000 words in each. 70,000 usually makes a good sized book. Go for 16 point print size; most of your readership would appreciate that. Do you have photos and maps to put in? I put in black and white pictures with faded edges to give an “aged” effect. They don’t have to be top quality that way. What about a title? These days you need something that shows up well on the search engines; such as Google, Bing, Yahoo. Try and include the word " Longhaul" and you can piggy-back on the success of Ashley Coghill’s best seller: The Longhaul Pioneers. What about: Continental Longhaul Diaries ■■?
One of the issues I do have with Lulu is that they only offer a max of 10 images in their text base book packages which have to be black and white. That doesn’t include front or back cover which is a separate thing.
If you want any more images, or colour images then you have to go for the all colour option, and as you mention the base price goes from $5.80 a copy to around $65 depending what size or package you go for.
I was in contact with Wendy Mothertrucker who gave me a few pointers and pointed out some basic things like putting in blank pages here and there as well as legal pages. But her books are text base so she doesn’t require images. Wendy suggested that I don’t go for a package deal and just spent a bit more time sorting things out before I made it public. doing a private print of one then seeing what it looked like before I committed to anything. Doing that it’s only going to cost $5.80 to have look and if you don’t like it you can keep reformatting until you are happy with the end result, after all what you think is going to happen and what you actually get can sometimes be miles apart.
I was looking on Utube the other week and there was a guy one there doing a tutorial saying the same thing, I think he is an author called Perry something, or something Perry, he has done about half a dozen Lulu tutorials all of which have positive feed back and support from Lulu.
On the plus side I thought the Lulu deal offered a better listing and distribution deal, listing with Barns and Noble, Kindle, Amazon and a few others as well.
I’ll have a deeper look at Createspace before I make a choice, and thanks for the advice on inclusive words for the book title.
Jeff…
First up I ordered a copy of Chris’s book, on the plus side it’s put together well, the paper and print quality are pretty good and it feels like a book in your hand. Good size as well, and the words seem to be in the right order. I haven’t read much of it as it only arrived yesterday, which was 3 1/2 weeks from ordering. I don’t know if that is normal for Createspace but if it is then I don’t think it’s acceptable, not in theses times we live. I had a good look around Createspace when I was on there and couldn’t find a way to buy direct from them so I had to go through a 3rd party, and the time problem may lay with them.
Most people have suggested that I get my story professionally edited which I rightly agree with. I don’t want to look back at it in a few years and be embarrassed by it. So I had a bit phone around and found the asking price is in the ball park of $70 per 3000words for a rough edit and up to $110 for a more advanced creative approach.
There are various companies out there that will edit as well as some pro news paper editors that do it on the side, all of whom want an arm and a leg. Roughly about $60 per hour. A rough calculation told me that for my first book, ( which I will drop to around 70,000, to 80,000 words and make the whole series 5 books instead of 3 ) would be in the region of $3000 just for a quick look over, which is far beyond my budget.
Add to that the rest of the fees involved in self publishing I really can’t see me selling enough copies to even cover the set up costs and there’s no way I’m going into debt just to get my story out there, I’ve already been an owner driver so I’m not going down any similar road again.
However being curious I sent of some samples to various companies, to see what they could come up with.
One was complete drivel and was so bad I practically couldn’t recognize it as my story. They even changed the names and moved the story to America “to make it more appealing to wider audience”.
One company sent it back with no changes saying they didn’t understand the subject matter, but that took them 3 weeks.
One bloke emailed me saying he had done it and I should send the rest of the story, but wouldn’t let me see what he had done first, he also wanted $4000 up front and the same at the end of the book before he would let me see.
I’ve gone back through sections of the story on my own and pick up bits hear and there, but I still wouldn’t be game enough to publish with out a pro having a look at it.
At the moment the books are on hold until I can come up with a better plan.
Jeff…
Hi Jeff, I think the money that the editors are asking is outrageous. You’ll never recoup that in royalties. You are writing for a limited readership with limited sales potential. But your buyers will know their subject and will forgive the odd grammatical error.
Reading the stuff you have put on here; I don’t think you need to do much. It just needs splitting up into indented paragraphs and the dialogue needs to be laid out properly. Have a careful look at how it’s done in other books. There are printing industry standard lay-out rules about spacing but I’m sure you could edit your own book into a reasonable shape by yourself. It’s surprising how much you can get done once you get in the swing of it; and don’t be afraid to spread it out. You’ll finish up with a lot more pages than you thought you would; but it will be a bigger and better book.
If you have the intelligence to write all that stuff so well then you have what it takes to knock it into shape and produce a good book.
Chris.
Hi Chris, I’ve read your book, lots of people in it!
When I write I use Word, I always do it with indented paragraphs and the dialogue is usually set out fairly good, but when I cut and paste to the forum it re formats everything, including moving all the text to the left and resetting the font size. So what I have posted here isn’t how it looks on my Word layout.
I have decided to go with plan B which was recommended by someone that has already been published.
Self edit using my wife’s skills, format a small sample ( about 100 pages ) using the first couple of chapters of my story, then print a sample copy and see how it looks. I"ll also use a few photos to see if they’re any good. Depending on how it goes, I’ll either go ahead, or change it until I’m happy with it.
I’m not going to put a time scale on it and I’m in no real hurry but I’d prefer sooner rather then later.
Jeff…
Well I haven’t posted on this thread for about 6 months, it’s not that I haven’t been working away behind the scenes.
After much searching I’ve found an editor that will work at a price I can afford, understands what the story is about, and is willing to work with me, however the she’s is a bit slow as she’s not full time at it and only does it now as a retirement hobby. So far she’s done half of the first book, and I’ve had a good read through it, and I’m happy with the results.
At the advice of the editor I’ve gone back into the story and redone some of it, and it has now grown again, so it looks like it will be over 5 or 6 books at around 80,000 to 90,000 words each.
The only draw back is that the publisher I’m going to use only really wants text based books and isn’t keen to do a book with photos, so I might release the photos on Trucknet closer to the time of publishing.
After getting every thing sorted out in my day to day life and having more then 30 seconds a day to my self I’ve starting writing some a new fictional truck based stories, which I think are moving along quite well. I’ll put a couple of chapters up here in a few weeks. And I’m sure you’ll tell me what you think.
Jeff…
I was hunting about, as you do, and came across this again. I always like a bit of tale and there’s a couple of good ones on this thread.
Anyone know what happened this guy? he usually had a lot to say, then nothing.