Riding So High: The Beatles and Drugs | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

@ewe2 Thanks. I’ve heard about that podcast. I should check it out.

Yep, I have citations and endnotes! There are 96 books in the bibliography, plus additional magazines, newspapers, journals and websites. There are 565 citations in the endnotes at the moment. Pages and pages of them. When people read it I hope they’ll see the thoroughness of the research.

I’m not planning any tours and promotions, though I might go to next year’s Beatlefest in Liverpool. I was considering holding a book launch in my local record shop but even that fills me with fear. TBH I’m somewhat publicity-shy by nature, which is why I’ve never put my full name to this website. I almost went with a pen-name for the book too, but decided against it. I’ve always turned down media appearances, even when I worked at the BBC and producers pleaded with me to appear on the radio. Nah, not for me.

I’m not sure I’ll sell autographed copies either. The advantage of print-on-demand is that I don’t have to handle any stock, orders or shipping – Amazon does it all for me. I’d have to buy in copies from the US, sign them, then send them out again – it’s not really worth the cost or effort. But I’d be happy to meet people in the pub in Cardiff and scribble my name in their copy (please don’t stalk me).

@georgiewood said
Fantastic, Joe! It feels like our dad has achieved a major accomplishment of which we can all be proud. Incidentally, generating an index may not be that difficult if your work was produced in MS Word. Even if it wasn’t, it could be converted for indexing purposes. I used to generate tables and indices in briefs all the time using a “mark-up” process, similar to what is described here.  

I wrote the book in Scrivener and formatted it with Vellum, both excellent software. I could generate a .docx file from Scriv, but the page numbers wouldn’t be the same as in the paperback, unless I started the formatting process all over again. Plus I haven’t finished the editing yet, so references might move around. I would quite like an index, though, so it might be something I’ll work on when everything else is complete. Thanks for the link.

Edit: I suppose I could manually paste every formatted page into a new doc, one Word page per paperback page, and generate the index from that. Something to consider…

Preorders for the paperback will open in 3-5 days, according to Amazon. Wish I’d known that before. Oh well, I’ll start marketing on Monday.

Thank you @georgiewood! It’s very much appreciated.

I’ve just lowered the ebook price to $2.99, and similar in other currencies (the changes might take a while to go through). I want to get it in as many people’s hands as possible, short of giving it away. Hopefully your pre-order price will be adjusted accordingly – Amazon are normally good with that.

$2.99 is likely to be the ebook’s launch price, at least until 8 December. I might keep it that way for longer, depending on how sales go. I don’t think it’d go lower – I still have to feed my kids 🙂

I’m not sure about Google Play Books – apparently they have a habit of slashing prices without warning, which Amazon then price matches. I’ll do a bit of research and see if there’s a way to stop Google from doing that.

Edit: Turns out they’re not accepting new sign-ups. Sorry ewe2. I might be able to use a third-party; I’ll let you know.

TBH although I’m an Android user I never think to buy ebooks on GPB – I buy everything through Amazon and read them on my Kindle. I wonder what Google’s market share is for books.

I accidentally put the paperback live on amazon.co.uk over the weekend and sold three copies. Oops! It turns out you can only have pre-orders for ebooks – for paperbacks the listing goes live once you sign everything off. I should have paid more attention! Oh well, I’ve withdrawn it again while I run some final checks. I think I’ll bring forward the publication date though – it seems silly to wait, and I’d rather get the word out. Stay tuned.