Hello. My name is Dinah Sanders. I've been blogging for over twenty years. I'm a web geek and writer. I like it that way.
Photos from my 1st-cousin-once-removed C'Anna:
"Dinah gets some help serving drinks from a tall handsome stranger" [who was at Alembic Bar when I was there before the event]
"This lucky fellow won a traveling cocktail bar courtesy of Dinah"
"Kelly quite conveniently won the other portable bar"
[She was super excited about that bar! She and her pals were very keen competitors in our game.]
Hooray! My second book, The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level, is now out in hardcover and ebook.
Building this book has been a fun time and—due to an aggressive sub-one-year production schedule—a challenge, but the results are beautiful. Kelly Puleio's photography is even better than my high hopes and the production quality on this, the first offset printed title from Sanders & Gratz, is excellent. I'm very happy that the book has the sturdiness to serve its readers many years on their bar shelves.
Along the way I've been expanding my skills even further into the publisher realm. (Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff is print-on-demand in its paperback form, so inventory management and distribution is a new adventure.)
Some of the lessons have been painful. I've now learned the hard way that Amazon's record of a book can apparently get messed up if the release date is before Ingram has their copies on hand—or at least that's the only explanation I can find for Amazon suddenly switching the book's status to "Out of Print–Limited Availability" sometime between midday Saturday and midday Sunday last weekend. We're now on day four of no order button for the hardcover, which is enough to make anyone trying to launch a book tear their hair out.
In the meantime, I'm keeping fans of Bibulo.us and the book updated on Twitter and Facebook. Also taking deep breaths and saying "calm blue ocean" a lot.
Copies of the book are now in stock at Ingram's Oregon distribution center and lots more will be arriving at their Tennessee one today or tomorrow. Perhaps that will help kick the Amazon status back to normal (though I fear that if their techs don't identify and eliminate the bug, the problem would just come back the next time Ingram or their on hand count hits zero).
Next Tuesday (9/17) will be the New York launch at Pouring Ribbons bar and a week from Monday (9/23) will be the San Francisco celebration at The Booksmith bookstore. Looking forward to those events very much!
Even with bumps on the road, I'm having a great time as an author and a publisher!
The first book from Bibulo.us is out!
It's been a busy week. Thanks perhaps to favorable winds over the ocean, we got the surprise call from our shipper to coordinate delivery of 2000 copies of The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level a week early. Whee!
Due to a series of mishaps denying us expected resources, Dinah unloaded all 101 boxes before assistance arrived. Yes, cocktail nerd, author, stevedore; the complete Renaissance woman.
By this afternoon, books are scattering toward their future homes. Those of you ordering from bookstores or Amazon will be gratified to learn that your copies are already making their way to the distributor and thence to you. Ebooks will soon be available through multiple sources.
The most fun has been delivering thank you copies to the folks who have supported the project along the way: bartenders, advisors, beta readers, cheerleaders.
I weighed in on this independent publishers discussion with the following comment:
This is good advice and matches what I learned with my first book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff.
Buy your own ISBN from Bowker (or, realistically, a group of 10 if you're also doing ebooks so you also have ISBNs for the EPUB and Kindle editions).
Sign up for Createspace and use them for their excellent prices on proof copies (also handy for creating review and Goodreads giveaway copies). Get your book looking great and prepare to build buzz. Do not use Createspace's Extended Distribution.
Sign up for Lightning Source (LSI) with the final version of your book now that you've done some proofing passes with cheaper copies from Createspace. Use LSI for reaching libraries and booksellers. Resign yourself to not making much money per copy through LSI and set the discount low enough that a bookseller will consider ordering from you. Bear in mind that LSI and Ingram or Baker & Taylor are both taking a cut out of that discount and that the bookseller also needs to cover their costs and make their profit in that slice. Once you add it up it's easy to see why booksellers aren't likely to even do special orders for something that's only got a 25% discount, especially if it's non-returnable.
Offer the Kindle version through Amazon's KDP program.
Offer EPUB versions through Apple's iTunes Connect and either (or both) Barnes & Noble's Nook Press and Google's Google Play. (Note: I have not yet published through the latter, but it is an alternative to the (in my experience) very low-selling Nook/BN.com world. If you want to reach a broader audience, it's important to have a non-Kindle, non-iTunes way for people to buy your EPUB edition, particularly if part of your audience prefers DRM-free books.
My second book, The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level, is full of great photography and, while the color print-on-demand (POD) quality from both Createspace and LSI was very much better than I expected, it's not yet "coffee-table book quality" and my partner and I have decided to use offset press printing. We still used Createspace for proof and review copies.
If you are, like I was, getting the error message "TOC entry has incorrect nesting level" when you try to export from InDesign to EPUB, try this.
This seems to be an error in the hierarchy of TOC style levels and probably means you've got a lower level item listed before the higher level of which it is a sub-part. For example, I seemed to have a style I called "section headline" coming up before any of my "Part"s or "Chapter"s. So how to find it?
First, you need to know which style is causing the issue. I created a new TOC style called "EPUB TOC troubleshoot" and one-by-one added in the TOC styles I wanted to include from the highest level down, exporting to EPUB after each one until I got the error message.
Once you know which style is nested incorrectly, now you need to hunt down where it's out of the hierarchy. In InDesign CS6, go to Edit > Find/Change (or hit command or control F). Use the little icon beside the 'Find What' box to set it to look for Wildcards > Any Character. Us the little icon beside the 'Find Format' box to set it to look for Style Options > Paragraph Styles > [whatever your offending style seems to be].
You know what mine was? The section headline on the print version's table of contents page. Ha! I created a new style from that named "section headline TOC" so that it would be separated from the rest of the section headlines in the book which I wanted to use for my EPUB TOC and then, hooray! I exported without an error. Phew.
Printing has begun! We should get three airmailed copies (for promotion photos, showing to bookstore buyers, etc.) in about a month. Great to have this beautiful hardcover on its way!
It's very exciting to see the book approaching readiness for the printers—even more so now that everything is falling into place to bring The Art of the Shim out in a beautiful hardcover edition! (Not to worry, ebook fans; it will also be available in digital formats too.)
The Art of the Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level is a celebration of being able to fit more drinks into an evening without getting stupid, sad, or sick. Smart drinking doesn’t require giving up cocktails or alcohol entirely, nor must we resign ourselves to a monotonous diet of simplistic, syrupy concoctions. Fans of sophisticated beverages can switch into a lower gear without giving up everything they love about cocktails. In brief, this book advocates more drink, less drunk.
Stay tuned for more information about the book and when it will be available.
FAQ:
Who is creating the recipes? The book will include a mix of recipes old and new, by some of the best bartenders in the world.
Will it be illustrated? Yes! With gorgeous photographs of each of the featured drinks.
What format will it be in? Trade paperback and a variety of ebook formats, including a version suited for tablets.
MetaGrrrl 