Those who haven’t abandoned their New Year’s resolutions to lose weight may actually have lost a few pounds by now, but I am thrilled to report that I have already achieved my goal, a 30% reduction in weight and… bulk. Well, not my personal weight, but that of the first book of my Herbert West Series, The Friendship of Mortals. It lost 168 pages and close to half a pound.

When I first published this book, in 2014, I set the line spacing too wide, resulting in a 554-page monster. It’s an impressive tome and is supremely readable, but because of that bulk, the price was unappealing. Now it’s a mere 386 pages, similar to Books 2 and 3 of the series.

Reformatting the Word document and republishing was surprisingly easy. I did, however, have to pay my cover designer to adjust the spine width.

I don’t as yet have a copy of the “compact edition,” because I finalized it on CreateSpace just this afternoon. Now I’m in the throes of preparing Book 4 (Hunting the Phoenix) for print publication. Once that’s done, and I have all four books completed, I’ll take a picture of them, sort of like a family portrait. Until then, this picture makes it clear why I made this particular resolution. The size difference suggests that The Friendship of Mortals is much longer than the other two, when in reality the word counts aren’t that different.