Today, on UNESCO's World Book Day, Integrated by Design goes on sale. 371 pages on FreeBSD, from philosophy to practice, with a subtitle one has had rather a lot of time to consider ironically over the last 72 hours: Why the Best Systems Are the Ones You Don't Notice.
Five months of writing. Three weeks of final proofs. Then the last 72 hours, dedicated entirely to problems one does not anticipate. In the interest of transparency, and in the hope that it spares somebody else a week of the same, here are the four of them.
The Font
The final proof came back with a rather small complaint: the lower counter on the number 8 had closed. Not all eights. Just the 8. JetBrains Mono, sixteen styles, one un-closed path at the foot of the numeral. At screen resolution and at every printer one had checked it on, perfectly fine. At full size on matte paper from Amazon's printers, the counter quietly filled in, and the 8 acquired the silhouette of a 0 with ambition.
The fix: open the font in a glyph editor, close the path, re-export as "JetBrains Mono Fixed" (four styles, which is why there are only four and not sixteen), replace the font throughout the manuscript, recompile every code listing, regenerate every PDF. The alternative is to reorder a proof print, which does not, it turns out, arrive the next day. It arrives in seven. The book shipped on schedule only because I did the surgery myself. One does note the asymmetry between "seven days" and "a closed Bezier".
The Cover
The cover PDF, on inspection, was carrying invisible passengers. Adjustment layers invisible on screen, dutifully printed as slight density shifts: large patches where the dark navy background went quietly grey-black. Subtle individually, plainly wrong once spotted. The kind of defect that survives every on-screen review meeting and then greets one on the first physical copy.
The fix was less surgical and more archaeological: flatten the layers, re-export, re-upload, re-approve. A bunch of clean exports later, the kerfuffle was gone. One is careful, these days, about what counts as "invisible".
The Price
Amazon's KDP form invites one to enter the list price, and quietly means the net price. Local book VAT is then added on top at checkout: 7 per cent in Germany, 9 per cent in the Netherlands, 5.5 per cent in France, and so on. The form, one suspects, was designed from a US perspective where the sticker price is final. For European marketplaces it silently switches meaning, without displaying the gross beside the input. The form is also rearranged for each book format (hardcover, paperback, Kindle), so no lesson quite transfers to the next.
At the moment of writing, a book announced at €90 sells for €96.30. Corrections to bring every marketplace back to round figures are submitted. Prices will come down, not up. KDP advertises up to 72 hours for propagation; in practice 12 to 24 is typical. Meanwhile, the dashboard is rather firmly locked while the change propagates. One does wait.
The Kindle
The Kindle edition has been sitting in Amazon's review queue since yesterday evening. Amazon's queues are famously unhurried, and in Amazon's hands. It will go live when it goes live: today, if one is lucky; tomorrow, if not.
A secured EPUB, a secured PDF, and a direct-order option from Voss'scher Verlag go live on the book page later today. The direct-order route spares the reader Amazon's timings entirely, which is, among other things, the point of having a publishing imprint.
What Next
If any of this interests you: do check back tomorrow. The prices will have settled to their round figures, the Kindle will (with luck) be live, and the direct-order page will be up. The hardcover and paperback are, of course, already shipping today.
Thank you for indulging the honesty. It has been, by any measure, an educational week. The book itself is, one is told, really rather good.
Five months writing. Three weeks proofs. 72 hours of launch surprises: one unclosed counter on the number 8 in JetBrains Mono; a cover PDF carrying invisible adjustment layers; a KDP form that calls the input "list price" and quietly means net (book VAT is added on top at checkout); a Kindle edition still in Amazon's review queue. Hardcover and paperback shipping today. Prices will come down to their round figures within 72 hours. Check back tomorrow.