SquarePeg Books

As I fiddle along getting things formatted and set up, I catch myself frowning at the last few bits. I’m getting a handle on Scribus and Gimp–I still have days where I have to watch and rewatch and pause and take notes and read through 4 articles to step my way through a thing, but I am getting there!

The last little bits of puzzling through the first book to be published now mock me.

Because, math.

Specifically, predictive math.

I haven’t yet assigned ISBN’s for the epub or the print book, I figured I’d do that last right before upload. And in my genius, I learned one can register copyright for an epub and its print counterpart on the same application, which saves money. Cool. I’m down with that.

My problems started with the tariff situation.

You see, when you assign an ISBN to a book, you also assign its price. You can put it on sale all you want, but you can’t increase the price over what you set on the ISBN. In order to do that, you have to get a whole new ISBN and barcode.

Which costs money.

There are formulae to figure out how much to price your book at, based on genre, page count, word count, paper type, file type, sizes, how much of a cut your distribution contractor takes, and all that, but you can’t just set a price and leave it.

You have to monitor it to make certain you’re not losing money because the costs or print or whatever changed. When you increase your list price, your ISBN changes.

Setting a digital price isn’t too big a deal until you consider VAT’s–value added taxes. Every country you want to make your work available to has a different one. And they occasionally change.

But again, for an epub, that isn’t too big a deal or too often. It’s the print product that makes things challenging.

As of this writing, tariffs and vats on books have not changed. But as I write this, everybody is staring at the markets and the trade deals and who says what when. Because while print books have been specifically exempted from the tariff drama, that may not last. Someone may decide they’re tired of it and yank that exemption. Alternatively, the costs for shipping, ink, paper and all the rest may go up because some of those items are imported.

Which means your printer/distributor takes a bigger percentage cut.

And given the way things are going, I don’t want to buy and set ISBN’s and go through the whole process five more times in the next 4 years.

Yes, I’m a cheapskate. And lazy.

So that’s the current state of affairs as I try to puzzle my way through the math in all this while I’m reaching the end of the PDF formatting stage.