The Lonely Little Fridge is going to be a hardcover and a fixed-format ebook.

Amazon print-on-demand does not print hardcovers, so I set up an account at IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com/), the publishing platform, who does print hardcovers. They also handle distribution worldwide; bookstores order from them.

In order to print with them, we have to provides all sorts of information, in addition to the actual book files.

They need a description of the book, an author biography, a cover picture, and a choice of keywords and categories to describe the book. Then you choose the ‘trim size’ (the final cut size of the pages of the book), whether it’s black-and-white or colour, what kind of binding you want (hardcover or softcover, and there are different kinds of each), and on and on.

Once these choices are made, you get to set the prices. IngramSpark charges a base printing cost for each paper book. You set a cover price; IngramSpark sells the book to bookstores for a wholesale price, and you get the difference between the wholesale cost and the printing cost. For ebooks, it’s a bit simpler. And there are different prices for libraries. There’s calculator that helps you figure this out.

Each book needs an ISBN as well, an International Standard Book Number. Many bookshops use these to keep track of their stock. Each edition of the book needs a separate ISBN: the printed version’s ISBN will be different from that of the ebook, and translations have different ISBNs as well. We have to provide the ISBNs for our books; fortunately, ISBNs are available for free to Canadians from the national library. In many places, you have to pay.

So now I’m partially set up for the paper and ebook versions of The Lonely Little Fridge (the Englisjh-language version). I just have to finish it…