Eighteen Classic Albums

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about a process I had developed for producing ebooks. While dabbling in a few projects (none of which are anywhere near being finished) I established that the process worked and I was able to produce ebooks in various different formats.

But what I really needed was a complete book to try the process on, so that I could push it right through the pipeline so it was for sale on Amazon. I didn’t have the time to write a new book, so I looked around for some existing text that I could reuse.

Long-time readers might remember the record club that I was a member of back in 2012. It was a Facebook group where each week we would listen to a classic album and then discuss it with the rest of the group. I took it a little further and wrote up a blog post for each album. That sounded like a good set of posts to use for this project.

So I grabbed the posts, massaged them a bit, added a few other files and, hey presto, we have a book. All in all it took about two or three hours of work. And a lot of that was my amateur attempts at creating a cover image. If you’re interested in the technical stuff, then you can find all the input files on Github.

There has been some confusion over the title of the book. Originally, I thought there were seventeen reviews in the series. But that was because I had mis-tagged one. And, of course, you only find problems like that after you create the book and upload it to Amazon. So there are rare “first printing” versions available with only seventeen reviews and a different title. Currently the book page on Amazon is still showing the old cover. I hope that will be sorted out soon. I’ll be interesting to see how quickly the fixed version is pushed out to people who have already bought the older edition.

My process for creating ebooks is working well. And the next step of the process (uploading the book to Amazon) was pretty painless too. You just need to set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account and then upload a few files and fill in some details of the book. I’ve priced it at $2.99 (which is £1.99) as that’s the cheapest rate at which I can get 70% of the money. The only slight annoyance in the process is that once you’ve uploaded a book and given all the details, you can’t upload a new version or change any of the information (like fixing the obvious problems in the current description) until the current version has been published across all Amazon sites. And that takes hours. And, of course, as soon as you submit one version you notice something else that needs to be fixed. So you wait. And wait.

But I’m happy with the way it has all gone and I’ll certainly be producing more books in the future using this process.

Currently three people have bought copies. Why not join them. It only costs a couple of quid. And please leave a review.