Nos complace anunciar que Kindle Direct Publishing ahora reincorpora el idioma yiddish y hebreo para libros de bolsillo. También se admite contenido de derecha a izquierda.
Hacer cambios a los libros en yiddish y hebreo requerirá la carga de un nuevo archivo interior ya que nuestras especificaciones han cambiado. Para obtener más información sobre la publicación específica en estos idiomas de derecha a izquierda, oprima aquí: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/GML3FXP998V8WS4U.
Yes, I am not happy with Amazon’s disregard for languages of the world. Quite upsetting when you think about it. Hard not to think about it.
I am waiting for verification, but my understanding is that the only reason we couldn’t do E-books in Yiddish was because all the standardized E-books use KDP. So, I believe we can do that now.
I recently helped a friend put out a POD book in Yiddish and English. Berish’s comments to UYIP in recent times helped me immensely in plowing through the different firms. Here’s where we ended up: We used BookBaby. They are actually pretty great. The biggest feature of BookBaby which puts them miles ahead of all the others IMHO is that they have quite excellent Tech Support. Ask for Christina in Sales. (And I am super critical of most companies’ Tech Support. The only other good tech support I’ve ever encountered is at BlueHost — which continues to be excellent.) For me, I need a lot of tech support — LOL — i.e., I can be quite a nudnik with my endless questions, as known by all UYIPers, and they remained patient and helpful. The quality of the book is fabulous. (Check it out — troim.net)
AND most relevant to UYIP, you can (yes really) put the ISBN codes where ever you want on the cover! I honestly believe that you can put the ISBN on the correct Yiddish Front Cover (what English readers think is the back cover). You see, you submit your cover art in a PDF which is like a flat image of the front cover, the spine, and the back cover all together in one single image. At the last minute, when you’re ready to hit “Publish” you get a screen that shows the entire cover (all parts) and you simply slide their ISBN icon anywhere you want. This is huge for us, right?
Now, if you go with them, you will initially have the usual stupid problem which is that the Yiddish back cover will show up as the front cover on the online sales portals. There’s a nice fellow named Sam in the Distribution Dept who will, upon request, replace the online cover image so that what we need will appear correctly. It happens within a couple of days on the BookBaby Shop page for the book. It takes a full month for the corrected image to show up on the third party web sites, like Amazon. But eventually it will be correct. (In our book, because it’s bilingual with the spine at the top instead of the side, we didn’t have exactly that issue. But we had a similar issue because we made a letter sized book landscape instead of portrait, which they consider non-standard. So, our problem was that the cover art appeared sideways online, which was not acceptable. Sam was accommodating in switching out the images. So, I am assuming that he could likewise make the correction for front cover vs back cover. If you go with them, call and ask for Sam to verify before you get started, just to be extra sure. Christina cannot help with that; but Sam can – different department.) As of today, our cover image is still oriented incorrectly on Amazon, but it’s correct on BookBaby. Check the links on our troim.net site to see what I mean. We have been promised that Amazon should be correcting the image within a few more weeks.
And more good news is that the author payment per book is waaaay higher if the book is purchased on BookBaby instead of on Amazon. I feel strongly that all books should be available on Amazon also (as disdainful of them as I am politically). But the book has to be easy to find and easy to buy, so Amazon — ugh, yes. We opted to have the book sold both on BookBaby and also all the third party retailers that BB can get it to. We are trying to direct potential customers to our website which links to the BookBaby shop as well as our private (non-KDP) E-Book. We mention availability on Amazon, but we don’t link to that.
So, what’s the downside? There is one. You have to invest a bit more funds than with some of the other POD companies. The costs are a set-up fee of about $300 plus you must purchase a minimum of 25 copies at the reduced author price in order to start production. In our case, the author price is about half of our retail price — but it could be much less. Our book is very big, almost 2 lbs. The author wanted only single sided pages; so, our 152 page book is technically a 304 page book — and then we used that large paper size overall. And we chose the thicker paper, due to author preference. All that raises the cost. They have handy calculators online so you can figure out all the financial stuff in advance. I needed Christina to walk me through that, but maybe you can just figure it out. Oh and they will get you an ISBN dirt cheap — like $38 or so.
I think BookBaby is a good option for Yiddish POD books. And they would have arranged for an official E-Book for us simultaneously (which we did want) if KDP hadn’t been stuck in that bad English-letters-only place at the time. So, our E-Book is private, only available on our site — better money for the author, but harder for customers to find.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon restores CreateSpace.
זײַט געזונט,
שאָשקע-רײזל
P.S. I’m still delightedly plowing through my collection of Berish’s translated POD Yiddish books. They are openly piled and displayed around my home and I proudly read them in the subway. Delightful. And I think they are inspiring more people to learn Yiddish. MORE YIDDISH BOOKS!!!! LET’S DO THIS!!