Monday, August 22, 2016

A second edition for The Battle of Chibi

First published in 2010 with the ebook version appearing in 2012, this selection and translation from "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" now appears in a second edition.

The format is "tidied up" as I have learned something about "how to make [MS] Word behave" mostly from the Smashwords style guide that coined the phrase and from Wordtips, a website with invaluable contributions.

I have also tweaked the writing to make the story flow better although I trembled while doing this as writing style is a highly personal matter and there is no guarantee that my "improvements" will appeal to more readers. I did take the opportunity to eliminate the errors I found on further reading and even sent my revised text for proofreading by a professional.

Perhaps the most significant changes are, firstly, the new cover as I have long felt that the 2010 and 2012 versions were too amateurish since I did them myself with the help of the templates available from Createspace. This time I used the expert design of Dawn Dominque whose website is linked. I recommend her services without reservation.

Secondly, I decided that I should purchase my own ISBN for this edition and create a different imprint for it and all my publications - SleepingDragonBooks. The reasons are technical and of interest only to writers - I shall spare the casual reader. All existing publications will migrate to this umbrella over the next months and years. Anything new will be published directly under it. The name will be recognized by those who read The Battle of Chibi or know "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms."

I have also decided to add a distributor to help get this title beyond the Amazon world, outside the United States in print and everywhere in the epub format. Ingram Spark was my choice, again for reasons that are of little interest to the casual reader. Other writers may be interested to know that there is more to be learned than one might care about the quirks of Print on Demand houses, e-book publishing, and distribution of books. Due to these difficulties, I am not able to provide a link to Ingram Spark (yet). But here is the one to the "everything store," Amazon.



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