We're approaching the final hurdle, which is to get the final approval of Rebellion for THE PHANTOM PATROL to proceed to checkout and finally hit the shelves, those shelves being mine and hopefully yours.
The price will be £21.99, although you might see some variation at Amazon and on my eBay store because of the way those two outlets charge. For instance, Amazon charges a referral fee, a fixed per item fee, a variable closing fee, and from next month a "digital services fee". And because they combine the cost of the book and the postage, those various fees also cut into how much you receive towards your postage costs. Same goes for eBay.
But since PayPal made it all but impossible to put up payment buttons, Amazon and eBay are my main outlets and for the most part we jog along quite nicely. They both have rules about how long you are allowed to take to put a book in the post, which can occasionally cause a problem. You really need to post within 24 hours, but print on demand isn't that quick or reliable, so I have to pay to get the books from the printer to me, so that I can distribute them from home. It's costly, but it means I can maintain my 100% record as an Amazon and eBay seller.
It also means that, occasionally, as it did this week, a little run on a book can mean I run out of copies and the book becomes temporarily unavailable. This is the position with HIGH SEAS AND HIGH ADVENTURES, where I've run out of copies and I'm still waiting for restocks. Most frustrating! It isn't exactly flying off the shelves, but I'm selling a couple of copies a week, and so far I have been able to restock before I run out. Not this week. I've even sold the copy I had on my vanity shelf.
It'll be back in stock next week.
So, with PHANTOM PATROL almost in the bag, I'm looking forward to the next book... or should I say books Yes, I should say books, because the next title will be a four-volume set of a much longer strip. It's one of Rebellion's biggest characters and if all goes to plan (which should precede every sentence I write) I should have the first two volumes out this side of Christmas. I started work on some introductory material earlier this week, so I'm heading in the right direction already.
I'm still hopefuly that I can also get my Utopian book out as well, this one in time for the Paperback Book Fair on 24 November. But working backwards, I would probably need two sets of proofs from the printer, and these can take upwards of a fortnight each, and it might take me as long as a month to clean up cover images and design the book, so that means I need to start work on it by the end of this month.
We shall just have to wait and see what happens. But, talking of which, I'd better cut this short and get on with writing the next book...
"One of Rebellion's biggest characters". Is he hairy as well? :-)
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