I have a book

I've recently published a book. It's available on Amazon.

The book's title is Does It Hurt To Think about Climate? The subtitle is Essays on Global Warming. It's a collection of essays from this blog, with some updates and some additional material.

It would be my great honor for you to own a copy, but I'm a little dismayed and embarrassed by the price. I set it as low as Amazon would allow, which means no proceeds go to me. That's fine. I never intended to make money from this project.

The reason for the high price is I opted for white paper and premium color ink—the most expensive combination. Cream paper, and black or standard color ink, were also available and would have been far cheaper. My choice was motivated by a couple of color photographs and some color graphics that I wanted to reproduce as well as possible. I'm quite pleased with the overall production quality.

Publishing a book on Amazon KDP was an interesting experience, with a somewhat steep learning curve. There were lots of little details to sweat to get everything just right. I estimate I spent 80 hours with design and preparation of the manuscript plus design of the cover. For the cover I used a couple of colors that appear on the blog.

For paperbacks such as mine, Amazon keeps 40% of the listed price to cover its site selling costs and its profit. The remaining 60% covers actual printing costs and, if any is left over, author royalty. The printing costs on my book are $11.27 per copy. Yikes.

The link above is for Amazon.com in the U.S. market. The book is also available in certain other Amazon marketplaces: 

Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Germany,

Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland