Ponyfeather Publishing Updates · 9:09pm Dec 9th, 2019
A few items I wanted to cover, especially of interest to a) international customers and b) other authors here who are self-publishing through Lulu.
But first, just a general announcement that I'm still here and still working. Over the summer, I had expected to have a couple more books released by this point, but the prep for BronyCon and the bookstore, the con itself, and some other tangentially-related-to-PFP post-con stuff ended up being deeply draining, and I reluctantly allowed myself to take a few months where I very nearly didn't think about horse words at all. I've been slowly wading back in, though, and picking back up on the nine(!) titles that are currently in varying stages of planning and/or production. (On a related note, if you're interested in a print copy of Monochromatic's The Enchanted Library, head over to her blog for information and a poll.)
Second, and the real point of this blog post, it's been brought to my attention recently that some PFP books were only available in the US, with international buyers having to pay extra shipping. This was completely unintentional and an oversight on my part.
For context, one of the reasons I picked Lulu was because they have a worldwide network of printers they contract with, so when you order a book from them, they figure out which printer is closest to you and send the job there, so you don't have to wait for (and pay for) a book to ship from halfway around the world. The caveat is that not every printer supports every trim size/cover style/etc. Well, it turns out that when you pick anything but the default cover cloth, spine text color, and dust jacket finish, that book can only be printed in the US. I think Lulu's UI could have done a much better job of communicating this, but that's another discussion.
So: every PFP title that used non-default options has been changed to use the defaults, because I'd like everyone around the world to have the cheapest possible access to PFP titles more than I'd like a given book to have a matte cover.
If you're an international customer who's been put off by expensive shipping from the US, take another look and see if it's cheaper for you in your area now. I know we just missed Black Friday/Cyber Monday and it really sucks I didn't figure this out before then, but the current coupon code ONEFIVE is good for 15% off your order subtotal through midnight December 12th.
If you're an author who self-publishes dust-jacketed hardcovers through Lulu and use anything besides 6x9 blue linen with gold text and a glossy jacket, be aware that your books will only print in US facilities and have to be shipped overseas, instead of being printed locally for your international buyers. Or more generally (because the previous restrictions may be subject to change): after you make your binding and trim selections on the first screen creating your book, scroll back up and make sure that "Shipping Origin" still says "Global", not "US Only".
That's all for now. I hope everyone's having a good holiday season. Stay tuned for more book releases!
New titles sound great! Also, the books make pretty good gifts.
Thanks for your continued efforts!
I’m going to mail you 95 ascii art pictures of my butt
do we have a book deal
5166853
If they're small enough to fit on a single page, yes.
I don't want to deal with formatting multipage ASCII art.
Dang! That's good to know. I need to go through my stuff and check for that!
@RBDash47
The only small downer is that I just bought some US only books. At least it was on Cyber Monday and with your 30% code, the extra shipping cost was nearly canceled out. Hopefully, there arrive before Christmas (I think the expected driving date is 24.12.).
Thank you very much for making it possible to print more books around the world. I as a European can now safe some money in the future.
5166831
I also had the same idea with the gifts. I just ordered during Cyber Monday a shopping cart with 5 The Purloined Pony books (I already own one and consider it as the best mlp fanfiction book in terms of price-performance ratio).
5166889
That's one of the few I haven't gotten!
5166889
It REALLY bums me out discovering that international folks have been getting needlessly screwed over on shipping for the past few months. =/
And I'm glad you took advantage of Purloined Pony! I love that it's so cheap.
5166890
You should definitely consider buying it at some point. It is a great story and you see that a lot of love is gone into the making of the book. And as I said it has is the best price-performance ratio which I have bought to this day (I own 25 printed fanfictions).
5166901
It’s on the list of ones to get! I’ve stopped counting how many pony books I have though!
Is there any possibility of having options for the cover style so people could choose based on the appearance and price difference?
I assume there is probably more that goes into it but figured I would ask since it seems like you would prefer to have those fancier cover options and I would guess some people would be willing to pay extra for it.
5166936
It's technically possible but I'm not going to do it, because...
Bingo! It would mean indefinitely maintaining additional instances of each book and needlessly complicating the PFP website.
Every book (except The Purloined Pony) currently has two instances in my Lulu account: a paperback and a hardback. So, say I find a typo or error in a given book (which has already happened -- several PFP titles are on their second or third revision), that means I need to regenerate both interiors (because the paperback and hardback interiors are almost but not exactly identical), and then go through Lulu's arduous process of issuing a revision to each. You more or less have to run through the entire book creation process over again anytime you want to issue a revision; it's unfortunately not as simple as just changing whatever individual content or print option you want to update and clicking Save. (For example, it took me several hours today to run through the ten hardbacks that weren't using default settings -- should have taken ten seconds in a sane system, IMO, but whaddayagonna do. It's even worse if I discover some systemic problem with my book formatting that affects every title -- which has happened! It was before BronyCon and it was before I'd finished every book, but I still lost a very valuable day essentially reuploading every book I'd already done into Lulu's system.)
If I added a third option for each title, then that would be more time spent on managing each title on the backend. (This is one of the reasons PFP will never offer casewrap hardbacks in addition to the paperbacks and dust-jacket hardbacks. I originally was only going to offer the hardbacks, until I found out just how many people really prefer paperbacks. It doesn't exactly double my workload, but it definitely would make my life a lot easier to only offer the one. You might notice that the vast majority of authors who are self-publishing are picking one or the other, and I bet not dealing with this is why.)
I would also have to revisit the website's design, to add support for an optional third version of a given book -- and it is optional, meaning I can't revisit the layout assuming every book will have one, because for several books I specifically selected the default settings since they fit the book well. Figuring out an effective, efficient way of communicating why some books have multiple options and others don't and when someone should or shouldn't select a given option and what the consequences are if they do or don't is a UI/UX can of worms that I don't want to open.
I'm legitimately annoyed that I can no longer customize the color of the book under the jacket, but if you have the jacket on you're never really going to notice; I'm almost more annoyed that I can't at least select a matte jacket over glossy, because the books with matte covers were absolutely gorgeous and IMO will be a little less so now. But: neither of those are a good enough reason, IMO, for me to deal with the above, or for international folks to have to pay extra just because I wanted to be snobby about giving Mono-Logues a matte jacket with gray cover cloth instead of a perfectly acceptably glossy jacket and blue cover.
5166961
I didn't offer paperback because screw having to make TWO layout pdfs for different sized books.
Oh, that’s how it works with such low printing costs for small batches. Huh. Makes sense, I guess.
5166979
If Lulu didn't offer 6x9 in both paperback and hardback, I would only be offering hardbacks. But that allowed me to
cheatwork smarter not harder by designing my interior layout to work for either.5166988
It helps! The rest of it is just the magic of print on demand infrastructure.
5166990
My issue is I’m too much of a book snob. I don’t put soft covers on my hardback shelf and my paperbacks are sizes for pocket book format. Else I couldn’t fit it all in.
Thanks for the update
The update is welcome. I can barely wait for the upcoming projects
Welp, here we go again.
On a side note, maybe the shipping was expensive, but I don't regret paying like $70 in shipping when I ordered (together with some paperbacks) some 7 hardcovers after Bronycon. Worth every single cent, looking forward to future releases (both PFP and non-PFP)