All books are:
5.5 x 8.5 inches
139.7 mm x 215.9 mm
Creme paper option
Gloss Cover
This page shows photos of my print on demand books. At the time of writing this post, in July 2023, I have paperbacks available on Amazon and the 2 hardbacks are proofs from lulu. Lulu offers traditional cloth hardbacks with a wrap that are perfect-bound as opposed to sewn, whereas Amazon hardbacks are pasteboard only. Pasteboard is where the cover pic is glued directly to the cover-board, quite often seen in text books.
I have spent 40 years working in the Printing Industry and I am impressed with the quality, both of the inside text, and of the colour reproductions of the covers, of both the Amazon and the Lulu copies. The sole comment to the negative that I would make is that the Amazon back covers do not have spread on the text, whereas the Lulu back text on the wraps do. Spread is where the text is made easier to read to compensate for the combined effects of the ink being printed on the paper.
Paperbacks from Amazon
The Amorphous Entity
The Earth Cycle - Part I
Spines
For any Authors who are thinking about printing low page-count books, I suggest you don't drop below 100 pages. If you zoom in you will see Primordial has a much smaller font; this was a total of 92 pages including contents, title etc. Null Planet is 102, but those extra 10 pages are enough to fatten the spine. Null Planet is only 1400 words longer than Primordial but the formatting of the story gives the extra pages, a lot more dialogue possibly. I prefer the 108 page range.
One of the good things about Print On Demand is the ability to make all of the production and formatting calls. I originally did the print versions of the Novellas for myself rather than for any commercial reason, where my intention was at the time to release the print versions of the novellas collected in The Amorphous Entity and Verdi Man, but I liked the result so much, I decided other collector types like myself might like them too; the novellas are cool as a set, like collecting comics or bubblegum cards.
The black and white collection covers are from the first novella of each set. I stretched the Obituary For A Planet pic to alter the look but the source pic is the same. The black and white idea was inspired by Joy Division's albums 'Unknown Pleasures' and 'Closer'.
I was a comic reader when I was a kid, and while I don't so much read comics these days, I still like collecting books. I have a reprint here of 'Planet of the Damned' from the 1970s Starlord comic, and 'Death Planet' from the 1970s 2000AD comic, bound together, and the spine width is about the width of Primordial's spine.
Hardbacks from Lulu
I wasn't so fond of the small size of the gold-foiled spine text on the larger book or the sans serif font. I would have preferred a larger serif font.
Back 'spread' comparison
The font sizes are both 10pt.
Hardback with spread.
Softback without spread.
Below is
Factory World without spread.
I experimented with an 11pt font instead of 10pt
Some Interior Text
I created the font BD1904 referencing a couple of books I downloaded from archive.org, from the 1904-1908 period, by E.A Wallis Budge.
Amazon Proofs
Note the barcode on the Author proof is larger and inaccurate in size. I changed the text placement because of this, but I could have kept with my original formatting.
