Tuesday 23 August 2011

The book wot I wrote

Paperback edition

Some of you may know that I published a book in 2002. One thousand copies were printed and I thought we'd never sell them all. Everyone on the publishing team was relieved when we broke even with 400 orders pre-launch.

Afterwards, numbers of copies dwindled slowly over the next six years. Contacts through the website steadily increased until we were down to less than 20 copies in 2010. I began to think seriously about an e-version when requests from the US and Europe increased reducing the numbers of copies available to single figures. The cost of postage sometimes matched that of the book.







Kindle version cover
Last week, I  published a Kindle Version for Amazon. It's available in the US UK,  and Germany at the moment. It came as a great shock and disappointment to learn that e-books attract VAT in the UK.

I was also a little disappointed at the Kindle's conversion program which rendered the Contents, index, and footnotes inoperable but, given that there are so few copies left (6) this is the one way of 'owning' a copy of the original 2002 text and (apart from the front cover) images.With a lot of trial and error, ( a steep learning curve)I managed to revise the first conversion attempt and now Contents' page and footnote links work and the pages look correctly formatted. Picture zoom and text to speech are aso enabled and I adjusted the pricing to absorb the VAT.



The Kindle edition should be available for download in the following countries:
Austria
Canada
Germany
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Switzerland
United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Jersey, and Isle of Man)
United States

Please sign the e-petition against VAT on ebooks. You need to verify your registration once you've signed up to the petition for it to take effect.