Making Transition to WordPress Site; Improving Web Site; D-Lux 5 Book Status

I am in the process of setting up my new, easier-to-maintain web site using the WordPress system. You can see the new site at www.whiteknightpress.com/wordpress.  This blog will also migrate to that site, though I haven't figured out all the details of how to accomplish that yet. For now, I'm writing my blog posts on Blogger, then I'll import them to the WordPress site.

Today I sent Amazon a message asking them to link the Kindle edition of the Panasonic Lumix LX5 book to the print edition of the book, which they haven't done yet, 48 hours after the Kindle edition went live the other day.

I found out good news today about the print edition of the book about the Leica D-Lux 5 camera; I checked at the Lightning Source site, and found that both the text file and the cover file that I submitted have been accepted after their technical inspections. The next step will be for the company to print a proof of the book and send it to me overnight for approval. I hope to receive the proof copy by early next week, and hopefully approve it quickly; after that, the print version of the D-Lux 5 book will start becoming available gradually on Amazon.com, then, more slowly, on Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon (and non-Amazon online retailers') sites.

Sales of Panasonic Lumix LX5 Book; Status of Leica D-Lux 5 Book

The book about the Panasonic Lumix LX5 camera is selling fairly well. Actually, it may be selling somewhat better as an e-book for download than as a physical paperback. It is getting a reasonably good sales rank on Amazon.com for the Kindle version, which just started selling yesterday, and it is still selling some PDF copies.  The newest book, the one about the Leica D-Lux 5, has started selling fairly well in PDF, which is the only version available right now.  The last time I checked with the printer, Lightning Source, the files for the printed D-Lux 5 book were still in "premedia," meaning the technicians are checking the files to make sure they meet all the required standards before the book can actually be printed. That process should take no more than another day or two, unless a problem is found with the files.

Today I noticed that the Lumix LX5 book is also selling in a Kindle version in the U.K., on Amazon.co.uk. There are separate sales of Kindle versions on the US and UK Amazon sites, for some technical reason; a US Amazon user apparently can't purchase a Kindle version from the UK site, and vice-versa.  Anyway, Amazon still has not linked the print editions to the Kindle editions; their help system says to give them 48 hours to make those links, and then let them know of the issue.  I'll send them a message tomorrow if the links have not yet been made.

For now, here is the link to the LX5 Kindle edition in the UK, for any readers in the UK who would like to purchase that edition of the LX5 book.

I'm also in the process of getting ready to switch my web site and this blog over to a WordPress-based system, which I hope will be easier for me to maintain.  So, if you see the web site take on a very different appearance in the near future, that will be the reason.

Panasonic Lumix LX5 Book Now Available for Kindle on Amazon

I submitted the Kindle file for the Panasonic Lumix LX5 book to Amazon on Sunday, December 12, and it became live and available on Amazon for sale this afternoon, by about 2:00 Eastern time.  That was pretty fast. The only problem now is that the Kindle version is not linked to the paperback version, so someone who finds either version on Amazon won't be aware that the other one exists without doing a separate search. I'm not sure if Amazon will automatically create that link; if not, I will send them a message asking them to link the two editions.  Here is a link to the Kindle edition of the Lumix LX5 book.  The Kindle edition sells for $9.99, about the same as the PDF, which is sold through my web site at www.whiteknightpress.com.  It will be interesting to see which of those two e-book versions sells better.

I'm very grateful to Guy Parsons in Australia for his help in providing comments on the final draft of the Leica D-Lux 5 book, which has gone to the printer.  Guy also pointed out some issues with my web site, which I have corrected, though the appearance of the site still could use some more work. Guy is a frequent contributor to the forums at www.dpreview.com, particularly the Panasonic Talk forum, and he also maintains his own excellent web site about the Panasonic LX3 camera and related topics, as well as about other cameras and photography topics.

As for the availability of the Leica D-Lux 5 book, it is available now in PDF format through my web site, and I'm hoping that the paperback version will be available on Amazon.com starting within a week or two from now; that schedule largely depends on how quickly Lightning Source, the printing company, starts producing copies.

D-Lux 5 Book Should Be Available Soon in Print; PDF is Available Now

Tonight, with a lot of help from Clenise in putting the finishing touches on the book's cover, I finally got the PDF files uploaded to Lightning Source, the print-on-demand printing company, for the book about the Leica D-Lux 5.  Now I will keep my fingers crossed that the files get accepted and processed without any problems. If that happens, I should get a proof copy shipped back to me from LSI within about a week. If the proof looks okay, then the book should start to gradually become available on Amazon.com, then Amazon.co.uk and other sites.

The downloadable PDF version of the Leica D-Lux 5 book started selling this morning, but a glitch occurred that caused me some unhappy moments.  This evening, as I was getting the PDFs ready to upload to LSI, I noticed that an image on one page of the book's text had shifted slightly, and was covering up a couple of lines of text on that page.  I hoped that mistake wasn't in the PDF version that was already on sale, but that was not to be.  The error was staring me in the face.  Luckily, only about 5 copies of that PDF had sold by then, so I quickly got a crash course in how to replace the PDF on the server of the company, FastSpring, that handles sales of the PDFs for me. (FastSpring has been an excellent company to deal with, by the way -- a very efficient operation with excellent customer support.)

I quickly sent e-mails to everyone who bought one of the PDFs with the problem, and then followed up with an e-mail with a new link to download the corrected file.  One of the purchasers sent me back a message saying he had downloaded the new file, so hopefully that solution worked out okay for everyone. It was a good learning experience for me, though I already knew that, no matter how much I check things, something can always go wrong.

Anyway, the corrected PDF is up for sale now, and the double- and triple-checked PDFs for printing have been uploaded to the printer; now it's a matter of waiting a few days to see when the printed D-Lux 5 books become available to sell.

One other bit of news today -- I notified the administrator at Leica Rumors (leicarumors.com) about the release of the PDF version of the D-Lux 5 book, and he, who has been great, very quickly posted a nice notice about the book. Later on, when the print book is available, he may run a giveaway contest for a copy of the book. Having the book mentioned on a site like that is great for getting the book noticed, and I really appreciated his responsiveness.

The D-Lux 5 Book is Now Available in PDF

Well, today, partly spurred on by comments and e-mails from a few people asking when the D-Lux 5 book would be ready, I worked steadily through the day at proofreading and fine-tuning the book.  A few minutes ago, I set it up for sale in a PDF version, at my web site, http://www.whiteknightpress.com.  The ordering page and other information on the site don't look quite as good as they did earlier, because I had a professional designer create the site originally; for today, I had to just go in with Dreamweaver and struggle until I got it to work. Later on I plan to learn more about web design, and I'm going to try to switch to a system I can better handle by myself, so I can make changes quickly without the site looking like it was attacked by vandals.  Anyway, I believe the links are all working. I'll provide a link here directly to the purchase page for the PDF version of the book, in case anyone doesn't want to have to navigate all the way through the web site.

Also today, I received word from the company that does Kindle conversions for me that they have finished their work of converting the book about the Panasonic Lumix LX5 for the Amazon Kindle reading device.  So, my next task tonight will be to check over that finished product and, if it looks okay, upload it to Amazon for sale through their Kindle store.

And, of course, I still have to put together all the files and other work to get the paperback version of the Leica D-Lux 5 book into production, which will probably take a few days more. So, plenty of work to do, but things are progressing well.

Home Stretch for D-Lux 5 Book; Some Progress in the U.K.

Today I finished what may be the final draft of the book about the Leica D-Lux 5 digital camera.  I fine-tuned it, read through it, and spell-checked it, and generated the index and table of contents one more time.  I took new photographs today for the illustration of the the three different histograms -- for underexposed, overexposed, and properly exposed images. I also took a new portrait of my wife, Clenise, for the illustration of the Portrait category under Scene mode, and I extracted a new example of the purple lines that sometimes show up in videos on the D-Lux 5. I could go on taking new photos and tweaking existing ones, but I think I'm essentially done now. I worked on designing the book's cover, and sent a PDF version out to one camera buff who's been very helpful in reading drafts of earlier books. So, if I can pull all the last-minute details together, I may release the PDF version within the next day or two.

As for sales of existing books, there was a minor step forward today at Amazon.co.uk.  They initially listed the LX5 book as unavailable, then available within 2-4 weeks, and recently as available within 2-3 weeks.  Now it's listed as available within 1-3 weeks, which I guess is progress of a sort. They do say it won't arrive before Christmas, though.

For the PDF version of the LX5 book, there have been six sales today, to buyers from Australia, the UK, Italy, and the Philippines, in addition to the US. The book's sales rank at Amazon.com has been staying fairly steady, in the range of about 11,000 to 15,000.  The book is still being sold by Amazon for the full retail price of $24.95.  Amazon did receive my shipment of 12 books for the Advantage program today, but I'm not sure if that small number of books (which are discounted quite heavily) will have any effect on pricing.

Finishing Up D-Lux 5 Book

Today there was not much new in the sales area -- several sales of the PDF version of the Panasonic LX5 book; the book is selling some copies on Amazon also. Today my main focus was getting the new book about the Leica D-Lux 5 ready to be published. I'm making good progress, and hope to have it done within a week. I'm working on making the PDF version more interactive, with hyperlinks where possible.