Publishing 5 6 7

 Part 5

Ok, last essay of the day, i promise. One of the first choices you'll face is size. Size and page count are highly maneuverable, and yes 1/4 inch can have a noticeable effect on print cost for your specific book. Ingram has a publicly available cost calculator you can plug random numbers into to get an idea. We are being fiddly here. The photo is a random assortment of books i read over the last 6 months. For comparison, my 3 books are 6x9.

Little secret, i absolutely don't care. As long as it isn't awkward to hold and you don't actually have OCD, it absolutely doesn't matter. My books are 6x9 because they are fairly enormous. They'd be 1,000+ page monstrosities that fall apart from their own weight if i sized them like Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick. Those Barthes books are practically pamphlets by comparison.

Play around with your book in your word processor and see what you like, then plug those numbers into the calculator and see the price. The only trick is that you add 1/4 (.25) inch to the dimension. My word processor version is 6.25x9.25.

The second tricky thing is that odd pages go on the right, and that's the opposite of how it looks on your computer screen. I've paid for that mistake so you don't have to.

Now some good news, that's it. That's all the actual formatting you have to worry about. Believe me, try properly collating those pages for double-sided printing in sheafs one time and you'll be ecstatic that that's Ingram's problem now, not yours.

That's enough for one day. I need my beauty sleep, such as it is. Hopefully i can remain on this train of thought tomorrow, but you know we never know ;) cheers.

Part 6 

Ok, just so we're all clear here, there is no market, only an entire earth full of potential customers. You're going to be tempted to think that people who buy books are "the market," but that's not true at all. "The Market" exists in the past of a future you who has already successfully sold some number of books. I know that sounds a lot like the future, but it's not. You are stuck living chronological while future realities buzz around like a swarm of gnats near the lake. The Market is the measurement of done deals, and the photograph you take of it is a bifurcating reality where you guess about the future actions of all the people who lived inside that photograph, and end up somewhere along THAT future with the relevant photograph from ITS past. 

The only data you have is the observable fact that nobody cares that you wrote a book, and they don't want to give you any money in the first place. The market is your interpretation of past sales as the basis for your guess as to how that picture will look in the future. In your brain, that fact contorts into the illusion of future people who might buy your book if you imagineer the conditions into just the right configuration of coincidences. That hallway leads to some heavy duty psychological feng shui, so we'll mosey off in a different direction. Plenty of familiar dirt to explore without inventing imaginary future dirt. 

Instead, we'll take some time to consider why that extradimensional fold in perceived reality takes place.

Part 7 

What the hell just happened in part 6? The answer is that i unfolded reality into its component parts as we psychologically experience them, not as they really are. This is the order of ideas, not the order in which we find out if those ideas are true or false. I am Bottle, welcome to my nightmare. 

What you've really done is created the architecture of your own future confirmation bias. At some point you will forget you did that and believe a fictional version of reality that bears no resemblance to the actual experiential process of getting there. You might never notice, you might smash into yourself running the other direction and explode, that one's a coin flip. 

You can see what's happening in my previous posts; we're thinking in two opposite directions at the same time. On one hand you have every human on earth as a potential customer and your brain tries to narrow that infinity down to some comprehendable demographic. On the other hand you have the reality of 0 customers and you're trying to bootstrap your way to creating that previously mentioned imaginary reality. Somewhere looming in the middle is the potential metaphorical car crash.