Tonight, with a lot of help from Clenise in putting the finishing touches on the book’s cover, I finally got the PDF files uploaded to Lightning Source, the print-on-demand printing company, for the book about the Leica D-Lux 5. Now I will keep my fingers crossed that the files get accepted and processed without any problems. If that happens, I should get a proof copy shipped back to me from LSI within about a week. If the proof looks okay, then the book should start to gradually become available on Amazon.com, then Amazon.co.uk and other sites.
The downloadable PDF version of the Leica D-Lux 5 book started selling this morning, but a glitch occurred that caused me some unhappy moments. This evening, as I was getting the PDFs ready to upload to LSI, I noticed that an image on one page of the book’s text had shifted slightly, and was covering up a couple of lines of text on that page. I hoped that mistake wasn’t in the PDF version that was already on sale, but that was not to be. The error was staring me in the face. Luckily, only about 5 copies of that PDF had sold by then, so I quickly got a crash course in how to replace the PDF on the server of the company, FastSpring, that handles sales of the PDFs for me. (FastSpring has been an excellent company to deal with, by the way — a very efficient operation with excellent customer support.)
I quickly sent e-mails to everyone who bought one of the PDFs with the problem, and then followed up with an e-mail with a new link to download the corrected file. One of the purchasers sent me back a message saying he had downloaded the new file, so hopefully that solution worked out okay for everyone. It was a good learning experience for me, though I already knew that, no matter how much I check things, something can always go wrong.
Anyway, the corrected PDF is up for sale now, and the double- and triple-checked PDFs for printing have been uploaded to the printer; now it’s a matter of waiting a few days to see when the printed D-Lux 5 books become available to sell.
One other bit of news today — I notified the administrator at Leica Rumors (leicarumors.com) about the release of the PDF version of the D-Lux 5 book, and he, who has been great, very quickly posted a nice notice about the book. Later on, when the print book is available, he may run a giveaway contest for a copy of the book. Having the book mentioned on a site like that is great for getting the book noticed, and I really appreciated his responsiveness.
