Or perhaps “bookkeeping” notice would be more appropriate?

This post is a surprisingly bit of good news about GameSpite books. The service I use to produce the books, Blurb, inspires a sort of love/hate affair in my heart. They still offer the best delta of options, formats, quality, and flexibility of all the self-publishing houses I’ve explored in the last four years, but they certainly can be frustrating. Their prices keep going up, their shipping rates are preposterous, and I can’t believe they won’t let me offer books in the same sizes with different interior color or cover style options as a single product with an option toggle. Not to mention the fact that they’ll let me make a PDF version of my books but won’t let me sell one — which is asinine, since I create the books as PDFs to begin with.

But occasionally they do something nice; in this case, they’ve changed their living structure so that books are no longer charged on 20-page tiers. Instead, they’ve begun charging by the actual page count. This may not seem like a big deal, but it will have a huge impact on our books. I’m constantly trimming content or squeezing material into the nearest rounded-down multiple of 20 to prevent costs from climbing any higher. The fact that I can run a page or two over and bump up the cost 10 cents instead of two bucks should make for better, less cramped books. And that’s cool.

And of course I would be remiss if I forgot to mention the coupon code ROCKSTAR still works through the end of March for a discount on the Blurb bookstore. I think it’s a 15% break, which should be exactly enough to mitigate the sticker shock of shipping rates.