Depression and pain

I finished the latest round of editing on my debut novel, and I started looking more closely at Books on Demand because I would like to publish my book through it. I can't help but think that BoD's website and instructions have always been terrible. Previously, you could publish just an e-book for free, but now you have to pay a fee and get a physical book. Previously, the cheapest option was 69 euros, now it's 79.

I was playing around with BoD's book sizes and the problem was that the smallest size would have a suggested retail price of 30 euros, which is way too much. Who would buy a paperback from a self-published author for thirty euros? I had thought the price would be maybe ten euros, but that's impossible because it would be in the negative.

When I first tried those so-called paperback settings, my book ended up being 470 pages long. I didn't know that 82,000 words is that much for a paperback. But it didn't feel right, because there would be so little text on one page compared to real paperbacks. I don't know how small the font should be, now I used size 10. Well, when I changed the font size to 8, the number of pages was only 230, and the recommended price was 17.90. But all online sources say that the minimum font size is 10. Why then does BoD claim that it could be even 8?

But then I realized that you shouldn't choose the smallest book size, even though it is a traditional paperback size. If the number of pages decides everything, then you should just choose a larger book so that the number of pages is smaller, and the price is therefore cheaper. I can't get the price under 20 euros, but the font size has to be at least 10. And some fonts work better in a smaller size than others, I think my choice is Georgia, even though I don't like it myself. I have used LibreOffice's default font when writing.

The price was too high and I was starting to get really depressed. Once again, you could ask, what's the point when I'm working on my texts? And at first I couldn't find all the settings I needed to publish a book in Libre Office. For my studies, I use Word, but I hate it. It's like a web browser these days, no thanks.

And then I fought for a couple of hours on Saturday to get the page numbers in. I can only imagine how impossible it will be to make a book cover by myself.

And I also ran into a problem where I couldn't get LibreOffice to hyphenate words. All I had to do was open the same file in Word and it hyphenated right away.

 

 

 

But then my poor health started to get depressing. When the blood doesn't circulate in my legs. I thought the situation would get better the more time passes since covid, because that's how it seemed at the beginning, the first autumn was the worst. But now that I go for a run in the middle of summer, my legs burn when the blood doesn't circulate. But the worst thing is that I've had the same thing in my hands. And then I also have endometriosis pain and joint pain, so it's nice. And I started to feel dealing with all that text in my eyes, and playing Dreamlight Valley in my neck.

I don't know if the joint pain is due to menopause. I've been thinking that it must be nice to have endometriosis pain, heavy bleeding and menopause symptoms at the same time.

Being unwell is especially depressing because my birthday is coming up soon, and I'd like to be in party shape then.

 

It also annoys me that I'm stressed about (those?) things, my jaw is constantly in the wrong, tense position. In the middle of summer, when I should be on "vacation". Last night I had a bad panic attack, I thought I was really dying again.