A lot of people don’t think a book is a “book” unless it’s made out of dead trees. I can understand that until I bought my Kindle and started publishing my Christopher Columbus books electronically. I say “books” because there are three different versions.
One is simply the original, all-English version that is only available as an e-book. http://www.amazon.com/Tacking-Through-Adversitys-Wake-ebook/dp/B007X8F278/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337002969&sr=1-3 It is priced at $2.99.
Then there are the two dual-language editions. Stephany Peñaloza and Deyreth García, students at La Universidad Latina here in David, Panama, translated the book into Spanish as their thesis for their degrees in English translation. I combined the original English book with their translation and published them as e-books priced at $4.99.
http://www.amazon.com/Virada-Estela-Adversidad-Desafortunado-ebook/dp/B007XU7Y7M/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337002969&sr=1-1 Is for English-speakers studying Spanish. The Spanish text is presented first in BOLD face followed immediately by the English text in ITALICS. This formatting, which I haven’t seen used anywhere else, allows the reader’s eye to follow the story as they would reading normally, yet they can easily check the italics to confirm their comprehension.
I also converted the book for Spanish-speakers studying English with the English version in bold text and the Spanish in italics. http://www.amazon.com/Adversitys-Wake-Calamitous-Christopher-ebook/dp/B007XTYMXW/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337002969&sr=1-2
While Amazon has reported that e-books are actually outselling paperbacks, a lot of people don’t have an e-book reader. I know that’s true of several people who follow this blog. Also, in an effort to supplement my income, I decided to publish the books through CreateSpace, the Print on Demand branch of Amazon.com. to reach a wider audience.
Let me tell you, there’s a HUGE difference in formatting a book for print than it is setting one up for digital publishing, and the learning curve for doing it was STEEP! I spent more than a week tearing my hair out (and at 70 I still have a full head of hair) trying to figure out such things as inserting headers and footers and page numbering. The digital editions of the book are approximately 288 pages. The reason I say approximately is that with a digital book the reader can change the size of the type and when that happens the page count changes. In a printed volume the page count can’t be changed. It is what it is. Sort of.
The first paperback edition of the English to Spanish book is 316 pages. I’m working on the Spanish to English version now and it’s interesting. Even though the type face and type size is the same when the Spanish text is put into boldface and the English into italics the page count jumps to 319 pages.
Well, folks, here it is: https://www.createspace.com/3862699 Because of printing costs I had to price the book at $9.99. Odd thing is that while it’s a bit double the price of the electronic version my royalty works is only 1/3 of what I make from the e-book. Actually I make about a nickel more from the electronic version than I do from the paperback.
One More Good Adventure 