This is a consolidation thread for all the threads I’ve made over the years for my books.
The occasion: I’ve done some tinkering with the shading on some pictures in my coloring book Wise Words from Shakespeare: A Coloring Book for Adults; the results are lighter. It’s still not a ‘black lines outline white space’ type of children’s book, but it may hit a middle ground that will please those who prefer that type.
I’m making this thread, mainly, because I had to change the hosting for images for all my books. Those links seem to be broken, so rather than ask a moderator to let me change each of the several threads, it seemed more reasonable to just put the new images in this thread, along with links to the original threads.
The illustrations in the Shakespeare coloring book departed from the usual ‘thick black lines’ style common in children’s coloring books by including some dimensional shading. But since some people found the shading to be too dark, I corrected the images. Here’s a ‘before and after’ example:
As you can see, the changes don’t eliminate the shading but do lighten it.
Here’s the original thread about the Shakespeare book:
The book is still US$5.99 (or less depending on sales Amazon may run–and of course, the equivalent in other currencies). It’s available at
(Many thanks to Rico for letting me make this new version of the thread.)
Wise Words from Jane Austen: A Coloring Book for Adults is part of the same series as the Shakespeare book; it uses ‘good advice’ from Jane Austen this time, of course. I used a variety of period paintings, etchings, and drawings as inspiration for the pictures. These, again, employ dimensional shading:
The third coloring book for adults* has a design that is certainly usable by right-handed colorists, but is expressly made for the left-handed–it has the text and pages-to-color on the left side of each spread, instead of on the right.
Wise Words from Left-Handers: A Coloring Book for Adults:
At Amazon I’m seeing, right now, US$1.60 as the price! Don’t know how long that will last…they don’t ask the authors for a yea or nay on the price changes. (!) The link:
This book collects wisdom from a disparate group of famous left-handed people–not about being left-handed, by the way, but about life, love, politics, art, sports, and so on. As I said in the thread:
Since the book was published I’ve heard from both left-handed and right-handed people who all said they had no problem using the book. For the right-handed, it was a bit of an eye-opener to experience something not made expressly for them.
*later in the thread you’ll see a coloring book/workbook aimed at children.
Now for some books available both in paperback and in ebook formats. The ebooks will be, in some cases, free for Prime members.
Grey Fairy / White Wolf: Three Classic Lang Tales, Retold is fiction with an academic bent:
The book consists of “three of my expanded retellings of stories collected in Andrew Lang’s 1900 The Grey Fairy Book. The original Lang versions are provided for comparison (along with commentary and historical information). The book includes three illustrations…” (As I said in the original thread–)
I’ll include a book by Argus Constant for which I did artwork, as it’s similar in size to Grey Fairy / White Wolf, and like that book, is available in both ebook and paperback formats:
(^ Front and back covers, of course.) Donald the Employee is a darkly comic novel of post-2016 American politics, and of the personalities that have become so large a part–for better or worse–of our daily lives.
Speaking of excerpts-- for any not aware, Amazon lets you look at a fairly large chunk of most books through its “Look Inside” feature; you see more if you’re signed in.
For those who still get a chuckle from the Far Side cartoon “Hell’s Library”–a bookcase filled with The Big Book of Story Problems, Even More Story Problems, Story Problems Galore, etc. …
LC4A and the Big Test is available as a full-color ebook, and as a workbook/coloring book paperback. The latter is greatly expanded, as I’ll describe in the next post. For now, the ebook:
This story emphasizes the main character learning how to find clues in a non-routine word problem, in order to figure out what operations to use and in what order to use them. A sample problem from near the beginning of the story:
A more complex problem from later in the story:
The text offers strategies for attacking the problems, which include simple drawings, as well as math manipulatives such as counters, graphs, number lines, and base-ten blocks. Graphic “white boards” summarize key words and patterns to look for in a story problem, in order to get from ‘paralysis’ to ‘solving’.
The “under $6” tag works for all books but one, it turns out, and I apologize for the lapse: the LC4A storybook/workbook/coloring book described in the next post is $6.99. There are used copies for less, though I don’t know their condition (it’s third-party sellers, over which I have no control).
For all paperbacks sold through Amazon’s old CreateSpace program (now KDP), authors are given a minimum price they can charge, which is set by Amazon to reflect the size of the files in the book. My LC4A paperback is longer and has more illustrations than my other books, hence the slightly-higher price.
If you have any interest in any of these, do check Amazon for their frequent price drops (which they make without any input from the author).
This paperback contains all the contents of the ebook (describe two posts above), and adds a Parents’ Guide section and a Problem Sets section.
I’ve heard from some adults who made use of this book themselves (they were studying for the GED). As mentioned, it’s written with lower-grade-level vocabulary (except for the parents’ section).
The story involves a little alien critter who wanders off and has an adventure filled with lots of things to count–things that are intriguing, colorful, and in one case, a little bit scary. (But not too scary!) A couple of sample pictures:
My first book (other than my dissertation) was Forum Finesse: A Guide to Impact and Influence in Online Talk. It’s an ebook. It’s got some usable advice, but it did come out five years ago. I seriously need to update it with the St. Petersburg “Internet Research Agency” (Putin’s ‘troll factory’) and other realities of our current life.
Still, worth a free look at the Look Inside feature (and free altogether if you have a Prime membership).
No prices are printed on any of these paperbacks; no one will know what you paid.
As with any online bookstore, beware of ordering from a third-party seller who charges more than the list price. For some reason I see a lot of that on my listings (maybe every self-publisher does).
Nice thread. Your books all look really good! I’ve been publishing on amazon since 2013, but very lazily. And I didn’t do my first paperbacks until this year. It’s great to see other self-pubbers on here. You inspire me!
I noticed with one of my paperbacks that has yet to sell a copy that there are already two other buy links for it. One from a third party and one from amazon itself. I was told in my FB group that third party sellers can somehow purchase options to sell your book without actually buying any, since it’s POD, and then if someone buys from them, the seller buys the book from me at a discount, and then we both make money. So yaays for that.
I have never had amazon discount one of my books without me changing the price, but I never used createspace. All my amazon books have always been uploaded direct.
Thanks, and good to hear from another aspirant, TheMysteryWriter. Whatever sort of books do you write? (J/K.)
The whole third-party seller phenomenon is a hot topic on some self-publisher discussion sites; there’s a sort of vulture/jackal feeling to the practice, but the way you describe it, it sounds potentially beneficial. (The real vultures and jackals are the many “PDF” sellers out there, who do buy one copy and then sell YOUR book as a PDF. That’s tough to deal with mentally for those of us who lack the resources to pursue the thieves. )
Anyway, thanks again for posting. We selfers have to stick together!
This says you replied back in 2018, yet I just got an email notif about it this morning. I’m not sure if anyone will get annoyed with me for resurrecting a zombie, but it feels rude to not reply. Besides if Cecil decided to give me a poke who am I to ignore him? :D:D
I hope you and your books are doing well!
I also like how you’re making good use of public domain material. I’ve only done one book with public domain material, my very first, a children’s picture book about dog sports, from which I got most of my source material from Wikipedia.
Most of what I sell is short smut for a very small subset of men who are into that kink. I have also dabbled in short Christian romance, sci-fi shorts, and nonfiction. I am eclectic. I want to write mysteries, but I haven’t managed one yet. I have 47 books altogether. Most are around 5,000 words, so they’re short stories.
I’ve thought about trying coloring books but I’m not artistic at all, and I hate dealing with paperback formatting.
It is a bear! And as it turns out, the personnel at Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing) can make formatting an eBook just as ghastly an experience.
I have a new paperback up for sale, but am still wrestling with the KDP employees over something utterly ridiculous: they keep sending me the same form letter that says:
**your book is disallowed because it’s available free on our site (it isn’t)
**your book is disallowed because though it has original content, the title MUST be “Public Domain Work (Annotated)” even though your book isn’t annotated, but instead has supplementary and explanatory material presented at the END of the book, not as annotations.
They won’t budge. Possibly, knowing Amazon and their likely love of below-minimum-wage workers, they are not English-speakers, or at least have only a rudimentary grasp of the language. At any rate, their only method of solving whatever problems they claim exist is to send the same non-pertinent email again and again. They never seem to learn what the actual situation is because they never read the replies they get.
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To back up: I’ve been ill and haven’t been able to sit up (due to pain, due to the location of my physical trouble). So I’ve been reading paperbacks while in a recumbent position, and wanted to re-read Jane Austen. All my copies are, sadly, cheap paperbacks with tiny font and worse, with small inner margins, such as require physical strength to wrench the book open enough to be able to read it.
SO, I wanted to produce a large-print edition. I decided to start with Northanger Abbey as there is less market-saturation for that one, as compared with Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Emma.
Having read Amazon/KDP’s rules, I knew that they don’t consider a large-print edition of a public domain work to be “differentiated” enough to publish. So, over the weeks after deciding to do this, I did my research and produced a Study Guide. I aimed it basically at: a) high school students and b) casual readers who have questions about some of the terminology they find in the book and curiosity about Austen and the circumstances of her writing N.A.
I was pleased with the outcome. The font is large enough for comfortable reading even for people who need reading glasses but don’t want to wear them. The inner margins are nice and wide–no strength needed to yank the book open wider! And the Study Guide has some nice, useful stuff.
So the paperback went through the publication process with no problems:
^ The eBook (Kindle) edition should have been ‘no problem,’ but someone with power over Kindle editions is enjoying themselves by raising the ridiculous objections mentioned above. And when someone is getting off by exercising power, you can’t do much about it. (Jane could have written something fairly gripping about this situation, were she here today…)
Their requirement that I change the title to “Northanger Abbey (Annotated)” is annoying because I can’t get them to understand that “Annotated” in the publishing world means that the new material (definitions, commentary, etc.) appears in the midst of the text. There are annotations–notes–that are tied to specific parts of the public domain work. By contrast, of course, my edition collects all the original material at the end of the work (except for that contained in the Introduction).
The KDP employees don’t know that this is true because they never read the replies that authors (including me) send them. The KDP employees simply send the same irrelevant form letter again and again, being, it would seem, proponents of the “Broken Record” method of solving problems.
Anyway, though this particular paperback doesn’t fit the “under US$6” title of the thread, it might still be of interest to gift-givers.
