I need to preface this post with some info—if you weren’t already aware of this, Amazon announced this month that they were raising print prices for any books printed through KDP. Price increases had already happened at other printing platforms so it didn’t come as a surprise. That being said, it turned out that printing costs for books with a 6″ x 9″ trim size (which is the standard for fiction trade paperbacks) were going to go up rather significantly as compared to books with smaller trim sizes.

Now, almost all of my Nicola books have an 5.25″ x 8″ trim size because that’s the size Evernight used and I liked it. And when I formatted the Future Classics anthologies for print I used that trim size as well because I am OCD and like to have all of my books the same size on the bookshelf.

But Random Realities was my first self-pubbed title and I had used the 6″ x 9″ trim size on it. Since I would actually like people to be able to buy it in print (and buy author copies myself) without breaking the bank, I decided to reduce the trim size to 5.25″ x 8″.

Except that trim size is locked into the ISBN number you use for your book so you can’t change that unless you unpublish the book and republish it with a new ISBN. I thought about it and decided to do it—it wouldn’t affect reviews, and Amazon now provides tools where you can archive old, unused titles and link new print editions to the ebook edition.

And then I thought, “Well, wait. This book is 11 years old and you published a bunch of other stories in the interim. You only had 10 stories in the original edition of Random Realities and were already thinking of releasing a new short story collection. Why not just add those stories to Random Realities and make it a decently sized book?”

See, Random Realities was *touches fingertips* a bit of a vanity publication. I wanted to have some work of mine in print and this was the easiest way to go about doing that, even though the total size was in novella range and kind of short for a print book. But if I added another ten stories written in the intervening eleven years, including my delightfully weird take on how the French would deal with experimental humanoids (“Le Gardien”) and my steampunk novelette “The Lark Ascending,” that would increase the size of Realities to a very respectable 67K. And with a smaller trim size that would result in a decently sized book.

So that’s what I did. Now, if you already bought Random Realities you don’t need to buy this new edition—the bulk of the additional stories were published elsewhere so chances are you’ve already read them. But if you’ve never bought it before and would like to have a collection of my stories on hand, it’s now available in ebook and print versions.