Oops! Or why the Compilation isn't coming out today but on the 28th

I have a theory -- a theory that every time you make the next step in something, it's always harder than you expect it to be. To be fair, I made a lot of mistakes in trying to publish the CoA Compilation -- I looked over a lot of things. And yet, I learned a lot.

 Before I get too far into this, I want to assure you that the dream is not dead. On Sunday (2/28/15 for those reading at a later time) the CoA Compilation I will be up on the store page for the fine price of free. Yes, I know, it's still like 4 days after the 24th date that all the banners say -- but in 4 days people just coming in won't be able to tell either way which is good enough for me. Besides, I changed my banner on so many sites I don't even know if I could find all of them to fix it.

Anyway, now that the actual future of the Compilation is safe (it's still technically published, right?) let's go on to explain what I fucked up on in publishing the comp (which it will be called from here on out since I'm copying this from writing and I don't want to type a lot). The major reason I messed up was by not scouting out CreateSpace (the "publisher") beforehand. I had honestly thought the system was just put through the pdf, put through the cover, type up a title and description, and set a price and publish it on Amazon as a Kindle exclusive (no manufacturing costs!) but boy was I wrong. First of all, I should have known that I'd need to fill out a tax form -- I was close to doing it for monetizing for "The Tower" on Kongregate -- but for some reason the thought hadn't crossed my mind. In case you didn't already know, I'm a highschooler with no money, and so I'm not yet at the level of freedom to sit down and do this instantly. Could I have done it? Of course. That's why this wasn't that big of an issue.

The big issue was with licensing. The free license for CreateSpace declares that you can not distribute the contents of the book anywhere but the Amazon and CreateSpace markets. This is an obvious problem since the stories themselves are already on the blog, so legally I can't choose this option. On the other hand, there is a choice to create a universal ISBN in which you own the contents and are free to distribute them. This, however, costs $99 -- fairly reasonable and affordable for what it offers, but not necessarily accessible to a student like me. I could easily get the money to do this, but it would take some time -- and that time would be long after the intended release date. And so, that is why I've decided to release it for free until I either get the money or find some other way to set up a payment system for it.

And then there's the last few errors, which were actually among the ones I had predicted -- the formatting fucking up after the odt to pdf conversion. Now, I swear to the holy man  that I had a genuine ass pdf lined up for the release date and its formatting was golden, but come the day I couldn't find it so in a rush I put it through another converter which destroyed the formatting (though admittedly did give it a nice font). Not much of an issue here, since I can just convert it back to pdf using a working converter (assuming that actually happened and wasn't just a fever dream). Also CreateSpace mentioned something about trimming, but maybe that's just for physical copies? (as you can tell I put a lot of research into this).

And so, the compilation book is delayed. Again. But only by like 4 days instead of 4 months. Also its free and shorts come out again in early March. Everybody wins?


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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

2/24/16

Okay, so here's the plan as it stands right now:

After a long time of work, the CoA Compilation Book I is FINALLY ready for release. The content is done, the writing is done, the formatting is done, and the cover art is done. Which means I'm finally ready to announce a solid release date: February 24th, 2016.

However, that does NOT mean that date is exactly when its going to happen. Let me explain why.

The plan for release is, as I've mentioned, self-publication. I'm doing independent publishing because the compilation book is really not that big of a project (in the grand scheme of things) and is just made up of content that was posted on this blog + a few goodies. The defacto indie publishing program is of course CreateSpace -- amazon's self publishing unit. There's one problem with CreateSpace though: up until this point, I've only tried using it once. That was in sixth grade. I have no idea how it fucking works.

That means, when launch day comes, a numerous amount of things can go wrong: the cover art might not be the correct dimensions, and I'll have to do it again. Or the formatting could translate pisspoorly onto amazon's system. Or when I release it, they'll make me wait a few days to check if there isn't some secret pipebomb recipe hidden inside. Or I might not be allowed to publish it for any particular reason once so ever (though I don't recall there being a requirement other than page count when I first did it). Any of these issues will cause me to have to delay it till a later time. Good news? If this does happen, the second date will be for SURE when it is released.

So right now the "official" date is 2/24/16, but I'm still anticipating something to go wrong maybe so I don't want to make it an absolute. Also I'll be making a full indepth video about this on astukari soon in case you didn't want to read this and just went straight to the end. Also hopefully the video will be in even more detail about whats going on, so just stay tuned for an update.


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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis