At long last, it’s finally ready. My novella Sword & Flower is available in paperback.
“But wait,” I hear you saying. “Your book has been available in paperback for a while now. Why are you acting like it’s new?”
That’s because the paperback edition’s cover is now properly formatted. Let me tell you a story.
When I first released Sword & Flower, I had no plans to do a paperback; however, at the suggestion of P. Alexander (editor of Cirsova magazine), I decided to do one. He formatted both the interior text and the cover to be usable on the CreateSpace platform.
I set it up, then ordered a number of proofs to correct mistakes in the text. Once I was satisfied with it, I made the book available for sale on Amazon, but I wasn’t satisfied — even though it was on Amazon, I would have to check Createspace’s site to see how many sold. Since I didn’t want to check two sites, I wanted it to be available on Amazon’s own paperback platform.
I transferred all the information over and reuploaded the interior file; so far, so good. However, I kept getting grief about the cover, even though Createspace was fine with it and the Createspace version remained purchasable on Amazon. Appaently, the cover didn’t scale correctly. I reuploaded the cover a number of times to make sure it wasn’t a glitch, and I even contacted Amazon about it, but Amazon made it clear that the formatting was not correct.
If you looked on the Createspace version, you would see that the cover had a white bar on the top; that unsightly bar made me embarrassed to make any formal announcement of the paperback’s availability. I left it alone for months, deeming it a failure.
Then one day, I sent Amazon’s response to Alexander, and he reformatted the cover to fit Amazon’s specifications. Just to make sure, I ordered a copy of the book.
I liked what I saw.
I am pleased to say that you can now buy Sword & Flower as a paperback.
Thank you, P. Alexander, for supporting me through this.
Thank you, Kukuruyo, for doing the cover in the first place and providing the crucial piece needed to resolve the issue with Amazon.
And lastly, thank you, Jeffro Johnson, for inspiring me to write the story in the first place.
On that note, have you purchased Jeffro’s Appendix N book yet? You should. It looks into the literature that inspired Dungeons & Dragons, the first major tabletop RPG.
