Days are Coming

Ido Gendel is a very talented author.
He won first second and third prizes in several science fiction writing competitions here in Israel.
He was not too surprised when I offered him to publish some of his stories, he was surprized however when he heard that I will not be charging him money, and that he might only gain from this process. You see here in Israel it's fairly common to charge first tie authors for their first books.
I don't think it's such a fair idea though. I think that publishers should pulblish, and authors should write. The nature of the business is to invest money in books. I did not gain much money by these views yet, but I think I will in the future.
Anyway, a few months down the road, Ido has published his book, and being a fairly artistic guy, also designed our logo and the cover for his book. He also designed some other stuff, but more about all that later. Our very talented Miri Peled also contributed a story to this book, and so we have the manuscript of Days are Coming.
BTW, Ido also contributed a story to the new edition of 'Keter Malchut". Now 'Days are Coming' is at the printers, and very soon, we will sell both books in the Israeli Icon 2007 festival. We have not translated yet the stories there to English, but we will in due course. Here is the cover, though:

The minor fourth the major fifth

So I went back home, and looked at the books I made. Immediately I noticed that the fornts on the back cover were too blurry. Also, the book was really small, which made the writing even blurrier. So I told this to Ido (A writer and a graphic designer among his many talents, for those of you who are just joining the action right now), and he made the cotrast better.
Then I waited for about three weeks before I talked to the Lucy From Sifrut, biting my fingernails throughout the entire period.
She said fine they would distribute us, but the books were too small, and too thin, and what is this silly idea to put a dark background for the back cover. I felt really stupid for a few minutes but then I remembered that I'm new in this business, so I'm supposed to learn new things every day, right?
Then we went to the printers, and they had a few things to say about the contrast of the side cover, because apparently it's difficult to wrap the cover around the book very accurately, so you don't want it to show if they missed a bit.
So after all of this I had the sixth cover, which is what I gave the printers about ten days ago. I should have six hundred book tomorrow!
BTW, the next time we print, we should leave 3mm from each side of the cover, just to be on the safe side. I told you I'm learning something new every day!

So?

I thought the second cover was wonderful.
I mean it was in color, and everything, what could possibly go wrong?
So I put it on the books, that had 52 pages each, and started selling. Actually, the sales went fairly well, no complaints, and almost no books left from that edition. (You better hurry up, one day they'll be worth millions :-) )
But selling the books I realized several things:

• People really do read the back covers, you should have one.
• People care about the number of pages in the book, better a small book with more pages.
• People thought the book was about Kabbalah, which is partly true, but they thought it's the 'Born Again Jewish' kind of Kabbalah.
• I needed a logo.

Also, I couldn't get the book into any firsthand bookstores, for that I had to talk to 'Sifrut Achshav', so I printed two books (a very smart thing to do, as I found out later), and sent one to Sifrut Achshav, these two books had the third cover: