cleolinda

Well, the bad news is that I was trying to wrestle the e-book onto Lulu yesterday and I realized that while it's true, there are no production costs for an e-book, they DO calculate 25% of the price when you set it and add that back on top for themselves (not unreasonably), which means that the e-book would now be $6.25, and after a quick straw poll on Twitter in which no one told me to drop dead, I decided to hell with it, we will just CHARGE that much extra, OMG WHY IS MY LIFE SO HARD ("...she said, as the entire population of Darfur shot her the bird"). (ETA: Apparently this shakes out to £3.92 and €4.47?) So after screaming at the computer for half an hour and literally pounding on the desk, I got the thing on there with relatively little trouble.

And then I had a Woodchuck and the second half of a large bar of chocolate, because I had apparently just published my second book, with this whole thing about needing to send a copy to the Library of Congress.

The good news is that someone overseas was asking when it would go up, because they were eight hours ahead of me. I had wanted to put it up on Sunday evening, like I said, because people will be bored and have nothing to do since it's a school/work night. Well, it's 11 am here, so I figure it's already bore o'clock overseas, so you can have it now. You ought to be able to use Lulu outside the U.S., but if you're somewhere that it won't allow, I have a couple of options I can work out for y'all. Right now I just want to make sure the whole Lulu thing works out okay (we did a couple of test sales yesterday and it seems to).


A few questions pre-emptively answered:

There are notes on this thing for everyone, including people who have no knowledge of Harry Potter except for the parodies, or even people who are just reading the parodies for the first time. (I actually tested this thing out on a couple such people, so I know this to be true.) I mean, you don't have to know anything about it to read me running on about the origin of the color puce or the stupidest folk band in the world or where "dead from coke" came from or the etymology of "w00t."

Yes, it ought to work on most e-reader devices--I don't know about the Kindle specifically, but this is just a PDF file. It ought to work in on your computer, Adobe Reader, the Stanza reader or iPhone app, and maybe even internet browsers? I don't know. PDF is generally one of the most universal file formats, so it ought to work for most people in most circumstances. I hope.

No, I can't really sell a print edition of this. I mean, I could, but it would be a defective product, because the outbound links and footnote jumps wouldn't work. So there's a reason this has to be an e-book; it's actually sort of interactive. I mean, it won't play checkers with you or anything, but it does stuff dead-tree books can't do.

Yes, I am going to pay taxes on whatever I earn. I'm not going down like Capone.

So... yeah. Hope you enjoy it, tell people about it if you like it, wish me luck, etc. Pardon me while I go chew my nails.