2020 has been a sad year for everyone so I cannot complain. I had hoped some traditional publisher would be picking up the manuscript and the book would hit the shelves by New Year Day 2020. Fortunately or unfortunately, I decided to write four other books. If the jokebook had become a hit, then I would not have written these other books.
As the jokebook was named after the year 2020 and it is slipping by without any book deals from traditional publishers, I have decided to self-publish it. Sometime before the global lockdown, I had mailed several book agents about the jokebook. One of them was a book editor at a New York publisher (of books as diverse as the CIA Factbook and Judy Mikovits's Plandemic) whose contact details I copied by mistake. She offered to get the book ready for publishing if I did not want to go through an agent. I mailed her the manuscript and she said it was too big and cannot be sold to both kids and adults as well. She said shelf space was limited and the book cannot be placed both in the Kids section and Adults section in a book store. I agreed that the book be split into:
- 2020 Fresh Clean Jokes For Kids and
- 3030 Super Sharp Jokes For Everyone.
The original book has over 3200 jokes but the number of original jokes has to be at least 300 or 400 above 3000 for me to feel comfortable. So, the books are titled similary except for a small change:
- 2020 Fresh Clean Jokes For Kids with 2400 jokes total and
- 2020 Fresh Clean Jokes Jokes For Everyone with 3200 jokes total.
This was going to be a big book but I reduced it to 277 pages by making the font really small. Each page is now jam-packed like a Bombay metro train. The paperback price will be around $11, which is a bargain considering that the 400 Fresh Clean Jokes sells for $8.
When these two books are released, the 400 Fresh Clean Jokes For Everyone paperback will be removed. Its ebook will continue to remain on stores as they can drive traffic to the two new paperbacks. I have not created the Kids book yet. I have to choose the joke individually so that some of the political jokes do not slip through.
In other news, I increased the price of the Kindle ebooks CommonMark Ready Reference and Learn To Ride A Motorcycle In Five Minutes to $2 from $1 because that is the price that some stores like Apple Books are selling even though I had set it at $1. The paperbacks are only $4 or £3.