Introducing the New Novel-Sized Edition of Roughing it in Africa
One of the comments I heard from readers of Roughing it in Africa was that the original version of the book was rather large. Complete with a collection of photos from my trip through Africa, the book came in at 372 pages in an 8×10 format. It is a beautiful book that I am proud of, but I get where some readers found it hard on the wrists, while balancing it precariously over their heads while drifting off to sleep at night.
That got my publishing agent and myself to thinking. How could we make the book smaller and more manageable, plus maybe bring the price down a bit too? The answer—some culling and editing.
I stripped out a good chunk of page breaks, adjusted line spacing, and said farewell to my beloved photographs. The result was a far more compact novel edition, 6×9 sized book with 364 pages of juicy stories to entertain readers with. And it brought the cost down too!
Introducing the New Novel Edition of Roughing it in Africa
While this format of the book is smaller, don’t worry about losing out on the story. As much as we talked about cutting a chapter here or some details there, we felt that the other edits we made took care of the bigger issue of size. Removing colour photos not only reduced page count, but it also helped to reduce cost. Colour printing is more expensive than black and white, so without photos printing costs shrink. And by limiting page breaks and shrinking line spacing, we could reduce the overall size of the new novel edition of Roughing it in Africa, putting it into a lighter weight category.
So today, you get a choice of the original full-colour version of Roughing it in Africa, the handy kindle copy, or the brand new Novel edition sized version of Roughing it in Africa.
Do you think removing photos takes away from the story? Why or why not? Would you be interested in an audio version of the story? Which version will you read?
