What Happened in August 2018--- A Retrospective Confession

I haven't updated this blog in a long time. Some of it is laziness, some of it is too much time watching 24/7 live kitten feeds on YouTube, and some of it has been, well, writing.

To continue the story from the last post, I published The Single Eye in ebook form on Amazon on August 24, 2018. That was the day it went on sale, at least; the upload deadline was the 20th of that month at 7:00 PM.

And wasn't that an ordeal.

It would have gone better if I'd spent the days between the 4th and the 20th making sure all the hyperlinks worked, publishing the website for Hendrick Hill Books, and, most importantly, proofreading the text to make sure it read exactly as I wanted it. But no, I had to go off on vacation for two weeks and save all this labor for the weekend before the deadline.

So there I was, swotting away at my laptop, not eating, not sleeping, not even getting out of my chair for hours. Around 3:00 in the afternoon I realized I had to revise my protagonists' big crisis point. Yeah, I'm glad I did it. It makes the story so much stronger.

But that meant I hadn't much time actually to put The Single Eye up on Amazon. Oh, gosh, that title font is way too big. Quick, fix the code, run the HTML through Calibre to convert it to ePub (or is it EPUB?), upload it to Amazon again. What's this? Those chapter titles are now too small? Tinker with the code again, run Calibre, upload, etc., etc. And so on, and so forth.

Just before the deadline I had a version that looked good. But blast it, I'd forgotten to add the back-matter paragraph crediting the designers of my open-source typefaces. Of course it was the right thing to do, but it could have waited till after the book went live on the Friday.

Because in all my fuss and hurry I overlooked one little thing: that there was a Publish button I had to find and click before I was done. To be fair to myself, on my dinky laptop screen it was hidden off to the right and I needed to scroll over to see it. But if I hadn't been in such an adrenaline-stoked muck sweat, I might have remembered to look for it.

Oh, I thought I'd gotten my final version published before my time ran out. So imagine my feelings when Amazon let me look at what was going on sale on launch day and it was the pre-revision August 4th version. Nooooooo!!!! And due to how Amazon works, I wouldn't be able to provide the real version for 48 to 72 hours after it went live.

So what did I do? I went on social media and told everyone I knew to stop buying the presale. And not to get The Single Eye the day of launch. Because it wasn't right. It wasn't the version I wanted readers to see.

Yeah, I did that. It was stupid, it was dumb, but I did that.

You wanna tank sales?  That'll do it.

And we won't even get into the fact that I rushed the August 24th publication date to be before school started, so my younger fans wouldn't purchase The Single Eye at launch and mess up my Also-Boughts. Guess what? That's the very time Amazon decided to get rid of Also-Boughts and replace them with sponsored ads. Grump.

It's May 2020 now, and book recommendations are back. So that's something. And the book is up. You can get your own copy of The Single Eye here.

(Next time, fun with print.)

Creeping through Amazon's Publication Maze

My novel The Single Eye is now up for presale on Amazon.  Goodie.  Am I celebrating?  Am I giddy with joy and relief?  No, and no.  My gut is in knots and I still feel about to cry because of all the confusion and mystery.  

Nobody told me that publishing your ebook on the 'Zon would be such a Byzantine process, or feel so much like creeping through a maze looking out for the Minotaur.

The website seems devoted to telling you what you can do, but you have to fight through the underbrush of unhelpful Help pages before you get to where you can actually do it.

The customer service people get back to you pretty fast by email, but, well . . . when I asked how I could discount the price during the presale period, why did the Amazon email help desk person ("Siri," if you'll believe that) tell me to run a Kindle Countdown Deal?  Of course I discovered I'm not eligible for that, not till I publish.

So not only was my price higher than I wanted for this period, but my book was listed with an ASIN, instead of the ISBN I put down for it.

Stressful as the experience is, the solutions I'm getting from fellow writers and the ones I'm blundering onto myself are working better than what I'm hearing out of Amazon customer service.  The strain of it has me looking around nervously for Horrible Things to jump on me around the next corner, but I guess I'm making progress.

So I stumbled onto the fact that if I go into the right publication details page in my Bookshelf, I can "revise" my list price.  Nobody who visits the Amazon book page will know it's special, but I can let my tribe (sorry, writer marketing jargon) know it's a good deal.

And I saw that the form had somehow stripped the hyphens out of my ISBN.  That may be why Amazon didn't list it along with their ASIN, which, I learn, they give to every ebook they sell.  I resubmitted the form, with the hyphens in, and hope the sales numbers will accrue to the right number.

I wish I felt better about this.  There seems to be so much to get wrong, from sheer inexperience.  I'll survive, sure.  But for tonight, I just needed to vent.