New Editions

This summer, we undertook the somewhat ambitious (or at least time-consuming) project of new typesetting for almost all of our books (only one remained untouched). This involved both using a new program and, for most, new fonts. And, of course, each book needed to be proofread, which added considerable time to the process.

The program we used was nothing more than LibreOffice, which is generally known as a word processing app but is also more than adequate for typesetting. Definitely better than Word or anything of that sort, as it was originally designed along the lines of a desktop publishing program. No, it won’t do all the things InDesign or Scribus can but it is completely acceptable for a typical novel.

We also moved away from the Bitstream typefaces in which the majority of our books were set. These were included with the Corel programs we own and use, but the licensing was always a bit nebulous. No one, Corel included, seemed to know whether it was acceptable to use them in print books. Be that as it may, they were also becoming a bit outdated, being all in truetype format; nothing wrong with that, to be sure, but we do appreciate the options offered by opentype.

Not that all the opentype fonts we are using provide those options. Some of our titles now use typefaces from SoftMaker. These are definitely licensed for print books and most, as with Bitstream, are clones of fonts that have been around a while. In many cases, we simply plugged in the SoftMaker alternative to what we had originally used. To be sure, they are never quite the same size and formatting must be adjusted.

But we are definitely moving toward open license fonts for future offerings. These days, there are plenty of perfectly good typefaces available for free, and free to use for anything. One can find quite a few at Google Fonts but it should be recognized the majority of offerings there are geared toward online use, not print. This includes the latest versions of fonts that have been around a while, such as EB Garamond and Crimson—we recommend going to the original projects, rather than the redesigns done specifically for Google.

We have finished this redesign and now comes the process of getting all the new versions up. This is not high priority, as the old versions are (mostly, anyway) well-enough done. But we will replace them over the next few months. More importantly, perhaps, we are also going to put all the ebooks (EPUB and PDF) up on our own site as free downloads. Getting those up should take some time too, as well as removing them from the store (at Lulu). Print will continue to be for sale and distributed to pretty much all booksellers, Amazon included.

Incidentally, we would recommend not buying the Kindle versions we had up at Amazon. It is to be assumed those will disappear eventually.

The PDF as E-Book

The bulk of e-books sold these days (or distributed free, for that matter) are in one of the ‘reflowable’ formats: Amazon’s AZW Kindle or the open source EPUB, most commonly. MOBI, the parent format of Kindle, is also out there, retaining some popularity. All of these are essentially containers for HTML files; there is nothing wrong with a book in unpackaged HTML, whether for reading online or for downloading, and these can be read in pretty much any browser.

We try to offer our books both as EPUBs—our preference—and as Kindle. The latter, simply because so much book traffic passes through Amazon. Not as much, I think, as some would suggest. There are a great many EPUBs being distributed that are not being tracked and counted.

But there is also the venerable PDF. Every book that is printed has probably been in PDF format at some point. That’s what printers mostly work from these days. But as an e-book, the PDF has a much smaller audience. Its fixed, non-reflowable pages do not lend themselves to Kindles and other readers and tablets. On the other hand, if one reads on a computer, whether laptop or desktop, they can look very good and much more like a ‘real’ book. I prefer them personally.

We used to offer dedicated PDF versions of all our books for reading on computers (or elsewhere, if desired), directly from our store. Very few of the online vendors bother with them, Google being one exception. They sold poorly—when at all—and cluttered our store, so we dropped them. The PDF also has the disadvantage of being a somewhat larger file than the typical e-book, with or without illustrations.

But it has the advantage of looking the way we intended. The correct typefaces in the correct places, properly sized and placed illustrations, header and footer, fixed page numbers, etc. In other words, like a print book. This, we feel, is especially advantageous for books for children. A Kindle picture book is not going to cut it (not that toddlers should really be reading PDFs on your computer either). Our early reader chapter books are available as print and PDF, not in any reflowable format.

PDFs are superior for ‘how-to’ books, manuals, instructions, as well. Anything with lots of illustrations. And though poetry works well enough in the standard e-book formats, it really can be presented more effectively in the fixed-page PDF. The novel, admittedly, works quite well as Kindle or EPUB.

We note that the PDF has a certain popularity with the ‘literary’ world. Perhaps because those who inhabit that world spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. What I’m getting at here is that we are going to start offering more of our titles for download as PDFs. A few are already available free in that format and we will add to those, when we can, as we can. The next will be Stephen Brooke’s collection of fantasy short stories, ‘Lands Far Away.’ It was always intended that the digital version would be free (as are his poetry collections) with a print book available for purchase.

How soon we might make novels available in PDF form in our own store is uncertain. It will happen but may take some time to roll out and include all our titles. This will be part of the process of changing the distribution of all our e-books, as we are no longer going to use Lulu for that service. Essentially, EPUB and PDF will be available at our store at Lulu and as a few free titles at our site, and Kindle books may be purchased at Amazon. Of course, print will continue to be distributed ‘everywhere.’

Update on Distribution

We have worked out a future distribution plan for our ebooks (print will remain as is). First, we are able to announce that Stephen Brooke's CITY OF WIZARDRY is now available as a Kindle offering at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VTZW4JV 

We had been attempting to get this straightened out with Lulu's distribution since August! We chose to finally place it at Amazon directly, using their desk top conversion software. It does not allow as much customization as creating an epub (with Calibre and Sigil) but it looks perfectly good and the process is much more straightforward than most. We will do this with all future offerings and, eventually, go back through the rest of our catalog. There is no great hurry on the latter, and books already in distribution can continue so indefinitely.

And, to be sure, we will continue to sell direct from our store at Lulu, in epub format (linked from our own site, of course). That and Amazon may be our only two ebook outlets in the future; dealing with Google Books, Barnes and Noble, etc seems more trouble and time than is practical but we'll see about that. There are three advantages to this streamlined approach. First, the simplicity of just getting the books out there. Second, Lulu will no longer get a cut of the ebooks they distribute for us, and Third, we do not need to invest in an ISBN for the ebook editions. All this is to the good. Expect our next release, WHEN MAN WAS YOUNG, to appear at Amazon on schedule, by March 20.

E-Book Distribution

We will be changing our ebook release strategy, primarily because of our distributor, Lulu. We have never had any real problems with the company for print fulfillment but their ebook distribution has been problematic. This was more so in 2020 after their complete redesign of their site and interface. Some of our ebooks never did get to where they should be and we did get tired of attempting to straighten it out.

Now, they announce that there will a charge to distribute any new ebooks. This was enough to decide us to distribute directly from now on, to Amazon and other sites. This means we will no longer need to give Lulu a cut of the profit (much less pay that initial fee). It also means we don't really need to allot an ISBN to the ebooks. That saves some expense too. Of course, it's a little more work for us.

In time, we will probably move the distribution of all our older ebooks away from Lulu as well. There's no great hurry on that. And we will continue to sell them directly on our store there, along side the print editions.

Into 2019

Some announcements for the start of a new year:

First, all is on schedule for the official February 2 release of Stephen Brooke’s latest fantasy adventure, “The Jewels of the Elements.” This is the sequel to “The Eyes of the Wind” and the second book of the Sajam Saga. Print and ebook versions are with our distributor and should become available pretty much everywhere by the release date (assuming one ebook vendor or another doesn’t find a problem — it does happen). The books can be purchased right now at our own store.

Second, we have finished (at least for now) revising all the print editions of our catalog. The last titles should undergo final approval over the next couple weeks or so. We are not hurrying quite so much on the ebook versions primarily because we would like to use our distributor’s conversion software and it has become unreliable. A new and better converter is promised so we shall see — we can do it ourselves and just might if it takes much longer.

Third, we are no longer going to offer any of Stephen Brooke’s poetry ebooks for sale. The print versions will continue but it has been decided to give the ebooks away from now on. There will be announcements about downloading or reading them online shortly.

And fourth, the brand new action espionage novel by Stephen Brooke, “The Dictator’s Children,” will be out on May 4, 2019. This is a tale set in 1948, in Cuba, Florida, and Central America. Lots more on that as we get nearer to the release day.

Donzalo Updates

Through the next few months we will be rolling out updated versions, print and ebook, of the four 'Donzalo's Destiny' fantasies by Stephen Brooke, followed by the paperback and hardcover all-in-one editions. These are typo and formatting fixes mostly—no change to the stories!

We are also lowering the price on the DD ebooks. In fact, we already have at our store; it may take a little while for this to be reflected at the various online retailers. Why? Because they are fairly short, a little over 50,000 words each, and they make up one longer novel, essentially. So the price each is going from 2.99 to 1.99. This way, the entire Donzalo goes for eight dollars rather than twelve.  That seems a more sensible ebook price.

Free Sampler

We created a little ebook sampler (epub) of Stephen Brooke's adult fantasy novels, one chapter each for all thirteen of them. Free to download, give away, whatever. And, of course, if you like them, you can always buy copies!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19M4-z0IwN5C7cn-Sf9SCjtnNl4LOOPG0

We made this, by the way, with the Open Office add-on, writer2epub. Does quite well, but for our commercial releases it's probably safer to stick with the converter at our distributor's site.

PDFs

We were just getting some revised ebook editions of our books on line (the great thing about a POD approach is that anything can be fixed, anytime) and began to wonder if there was any point in offering PDF versions. We have always done this as a matter of course, along side the print and epub editions (and the Kindle variant that shows up at Amazon --- they convert that from the epub). But the PDFs do not really sell.

It is not that much trouble to create them, understand, a few very minor changes from the  print edition (margins slightly altered, ISBN removed, cover added). But it is an additional chore and perhaps for no reason. For now, we do not intend to change our procedure and will continue to offer the PDF online --- at book shows and so on, we have been including it in a bundle with the epub and/or print books.

Thinking out loud here --- anyway, PDFs of most of our books are available at our 'spotlight store' and will continue to be. Now we need to start thinking about audio books!

About Ebooks

A couple notes about our ebooks:

We do not specify a font for our ebook offerings, whether EPUB or MOBI (Kindle) but prefer to leave that to the individual reader. A Garamond is often a good choice for novels and stories, and adequate for poetry. Our PDFs do have embedded typefaces, usually the same as those used for print.

Our ebooks do not contain DRMs. You own them. This assumes that you buy them from Arachis Press and not from Amazon or some other retailer — it is always possible for them to mess things up (although they are not supposed to). Yes, this means the books can be pirated but so be it; if you pay for something, it should be yours.

EPUB Delay

Just a mention that the epub version of THE SONG OF THE SWORD will be delayed a bit before appearing at various outlets around the internet (Barnes and Noble, etc). It is available, however, from our own store.

There was a glitch in attaching the 'cover' to the text, which was apparently no fault of ours, though we should have noticed it in our downloaded 'proof' copy. Anyway, we have revised and republished and the new version appears to be properly done so we expect it to show up everywhere soon.

Nowhere? at Amazon!

We have decided to finally make Kindle versions available of some of our titles, starting with 'The Middle of Nowhere,' the Young Adult title by Stephen Brooke. It may be found HERE.

We have priced it at 2.99. The EPUB version is still available both at our own store and at iTunes and Barnes & Noble. Not to mention the print version, of course!

A NOTE, Aug 31, 2013: We have withdrawn all our books from Amazon and the Kindle format.  They will, of course, remain on sale in print and EPUB (and some as PDF) at our other outlets.

The Fairy Has Landed

Arachis Press is proud to announce the official release of ‘The Contrary Fairy,’ a magical story from author and illustrator Stephen Brooke.

The sprite Marjoram is called a contrary fairy when she tries to keep her carefree friends from getting into trouble. Will they learn to listen to her? ‘Fairy’ follows the little folk on a day of adventures and lessons learned.

A beginner’s chapter book, ‘The Contrary Fairy’ runs to about 4000 words, spread over 11 chapters and forty pages, with 18 black and white illustrations.

‘Fairy’ is available, as are all Stephen’s titles, through The Arachis Press (http://arachispress.com) and our printer (http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/arachispress). Retail price for the paperback is 6.99; the PDF runs 1.99.

We have eschewed an EPUB version for this book as it is not well suited to products for small children.

ebooks

A mention that three of our four books by Stephen Brooke (plus his free short-story, 'A Tale of Two Turkeys') are available at both the Barnes and Noble and the Apple stores. Just search for 'Stephen Brooke' to find 'The Middle of Nowhere,' 'Dreamwinds,' and 'Pieces of the Moon' in epub format.

His picture book for the little ones, 'A Mouse Is In The House,' is not available in epub. We don't think toddlers are using e-readers all that much.

Here are links for 'The Middle of Nowhere,' Stephen's Young Adult novel, at both stores:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-middle-of-nowhere/id479348551?mt=11

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-middle-of-nowhere-stephen-brooke/1106492097