American Zen on CreateSpace

     I'm sorry I haven't been screaming my fool head off of late on matters political and social. I've been busy setting up my dedicated book blog Kindle in the Wind, reuploading a lot of files on my new Scribd account. And for the last 24 hours or so, in between my neverending job search, I was busy reformatting, uploading, designing and proofing the Create Space edition of American Zen. The templates they give you largely suck and doesn't allow me to use the cover done by my soul sister Alicia Morgan two and a half years ago but when CreateSpace offers to give you a physical copy of your book as a freebie, you don't say no.
     The cover above is what I decided to run with for now until such time I can afford to pay CreateSpace's cover art team to redo it according to my exact specifications (click on the cover for a full-scale image). American Zen was originally a 421 page Word file but on account of the reformatting and the trim size I'd chosen, I had to narrow the gutter and outside margins so you'd think the page count would be larger. But on account of the limited options for trim size, I had to go with a Reader's Digest-sized 7x10 inches, meaning each full page has 43 lines instead of the standard 32. This means American Zen is now at a trimmer 358 pages.
     It goes for $5.14, just a few cents more than the Kindle version ($4.99) but the shipping and handling is over three bucks, meaning a copy of American Zen goes for $8.57, the lowest price they would allow me to set. The royalty rate, for POD publishing, is a joke, at about 20%. But I'd ordered a physical copy for myself after I'd proofed the galley and I'll be posting a picture of the physical book when it arrives next month.
     Please give it a looksee (I'm transferring the CreateSpace edition to Kindle as I write this but the first few chapters of the Kindle version can be downloaded for free and you don't even need a Kindle. Just click on the image on its product page.).
     Interesting trivia: When the template I'd chosen demanded an author photo, I panicked. It would've looked borderline antisocial if I'd gone with an avatar of something else like I do on Twitter and elsewhere. But since I look every nanosecond my age and am now about as photogenic as southern roadkill, I didn't know what to do until Mrs. JP sent me from her cell phone a picture she'd taken of me at the Stewart/Colbert Fear Rally in Washington DC two years ago.