Yeah, so it wasn't really a hundred years but it certainly took about that many days off my expected life span, and gave me many more times that in grey hairs.
Take it from me, deciding to design and create your own divination cards is one thing. Then deciding to publish them for the world to buy (or the one or two people who actually want them) is a whole other ball game.
First, there's the dreaded Edister, who insists that you haven't written nearly enough and have to add all sorts of stuff you know needs to be in there but really didn't want to write.
Then said Edister decides that providing the option to download the pdf files and print your own cards isn't enough, there has to be a way to get them professionally printed, and so sets you the task of uploading said images to makeplayingcards.com. Just make sure you haven't resized your image files to actually fit the cards or you'll have to resample them all to improve the quality after you went to all the trouble of making them nice and small to print your own copy.
Then of course there's all the different versions and file types of all the various images that aren't actually images of the cards themselves - there's the book cover image in at least two different file formats. There's the logo, in various incarnations (with text, without text, with different text). Don't forget that the 'About Author' blurb at the back needs a photograph of the actual author - no you can't use an avatar.
So yeah there's a bit of fine tuning required before you can actually hand over your literary baby to the Edister, who then begins chuntering and grumbling about all the different file formats she then has to provide for different online book retailers. At least Gumroad just needs a couple of PDFs right? Right, kinda. One of those PDFs has to be a printable file with good quality images of all the card images sized to print - encore for the resampled images uploaded to makeplayingcards.com, copy and paste, and we're done, right?
Wrong. Once that printable PDF file of the images is done you have to create a new product on Gumroad to offer it for sale. Then you have to wait for Edister to send you the finished ebook. Then you have to upload that to the pre-lease that was already there and hit the 'release now' button. Then you have to make another new product to offer the ebook and card image file as a bundle and upload them both together. But then you're finished right?
Wrong again. Now begins the life long task of attempting to find people interested enough to actually buy the products and use the cards.
So please, please, please, please, please even if you're not interested in cartomancy yourself, even if you think nobody you know could possibly be interested in cartomancy, pass on this blog post and spread the word. You never know, somebody in your life could be a closet cartomancer, just as I was for 30 years.
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