back and forth

I'm currently going back and forth with System Pro, the print shop near Seoul National University. The lady keeps texting about how this or that needs to be adjusted on my back-cover graphic (it was all originally formatted for B5 paper, including bleed-to-the-edge considerations, so no adjustments should be necessary), and how the front-cover graphic will look strange if we do a bleed-to-the-edge for the image. She asked me to send pics of the previous version of the book from 2022, so I sent some photos over since I no longer have the original files (died with my laptop). She seemed to have no trouble, last time, with making her own tweaks before printing. I don't know what the problem is this time. Oh, yeah: her projected cost to print one copy of the book is W11,800, so it'll be almost W240,000 for twenty copies. I had set the ISBN and cover price at $11.99, which comes out to almost exactly W17,000 as of today, so I'd be making barely W5,000 per copy—about $3.50. Yay, me.

People had better buy the print-on-demand paperback version, which costs me nothing to print. One person has already purchased a copy. That's nice. A cool $4.32 in my pocketses. If I could convince 500,000 parents to buy the book, that'd be $2,160,000 before taxes, and I imagine the taxes would come close to 50% for that amount of money.

Once System Pro prints my books, the next thing I'll do is contact that publishing house in Daegu—the one whose ad I'd seen on my walk. If they're a real publishing house and not just a vanity publisher/printer, they could help with marketing, with getting my book into stores, etc. (assuming anyone outside of old-school academics buys dead-tree books anymore!).

Meanwhile, I'm still generating questions for my Do You Deserve to Vote? app. The logic problem I'd put up earlier is part of the section called "Can You Think Logically?" Once I've got everything vibe-coded and up on my quiz/test website, I'll invite some curmudgeons to use the app and suggest improvements, then eventually put the app up for sale at the Apple App store and the Google Play Store. There are also other, slightly more niche places where apps can be sold, like Flippa. I'm still learning the ropes about all of this, so bear with my clumsiness (or Pardon Our Dust, as they say).