I promised when I began this blog that I was going to share what works and doesn’t work in independent publishing, which to me must include the ups and downs. This past week has been a bit on the tough side. Here I was, sailing along at the top of my game, or so it felt. I joined a group of fellow authors to give away one of our books during Teacher Appreciation Week. It was fun, especially when I needed to do little but get my book and whatever else was needed to them by certain deadlines. At this point in my ‘career’ some of this took time. My teammates seemed so accomplished—and young enough to be my granddaughters. I was learning so much from simply watching what they were doing.
Anyway, everything was moving along smoothly. There was some discussion that we weren’t giving away as many books as they had thought we would. And that despite them being free ebooks. But I was happy. From what I could tell there would be 30 new people reading Absurd, Said Bird.
Then came the crash. One of my ‘partners’ emailed me privately that I needed to look at my Kindle book—which I didn’t do immediately, I’ll admit. But a few hours later I received the same sort of message in another private post. You can bet I hit the keys then. And what did I discover? My Kindle book was out of whack, with words spilling off the page and more. How could that be? I was sure I had checked it early on and had seen none of this. Or had I? That’s what I’m now wondering. Being so new to all this, did I think, oh well, a few overflowing words won’t matter?
My illustrator is the best there is in both work ethic and talent. She is also my designer for this series. Minutes after I emailed her about our problem, she was on it. It took more than a day for her to figure out what should have been done differently. We had both learned something. Now all is well and off we go until something else trips us up. That’s the other thing about independent publishing. It’s not only what is done right that you get credit for, it’s what you do wrong. For some reason, you feel the wrongs are what everyone is going to remember. And you feel in some way you let the team down, though it only affected my book.
There’s a reason to always keep this tune in your head, ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again,’ because that’s what you feel you are doing. Starting all over again. Is that a bad thing? We shall see. What I need to keep reminding myself is that I am still in the toddler stage and to keep in mind how toddlers might not dust themselves off, but they definitely pick themselves up and start all over again. And again. And again. Thinking of it from another perspective, it’s not starting over, it’s simply putting things edited and in their right file. Something else I will be writing about soon.
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