As I stay up late nights trying to format my first novel for self-publication (Scrivener-Word-Pages-eek), I have begun a list of things it never occurred to me I would ever do. For example, I can’t believe that I:
1. spent 30+ hours going through every interior formatting program I could find, on and off-line, only to finally decide that I would
2. select a program based on how the scene separators and fonts look, then
3. spend $250 on Vellum, a formatting program that still won’t do everything I want, and
4. be so picky about how the e-book looks that I’d even bother, and then
5. replace my carefully chosen scene separators by hand, not once but three times, for each of 76 separators, then
6. actually consider selling my e-book on Amazon, and worse
7. consider letting Amazon print my book even though I’d already uploaded to Ingram to get away from Amazon (you can do both), then
8. make a bunch of accounts at Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. with an idea that I’d upload my e-book to each of these even though I will also use Draft-2-Digital, an aggregator that publishes to all of these, and
9. worry about how my website and images of the book appear, even though my website will likely have few visitors, and
10. finally upload a file for the paperback to Ingram, five minutes before I receive my Library of Congress number (which should be in the book).
No one told me this would be easy, but really, I had no idea.
Lisa – I have just finished reading Bernadine Evaristo’s Manifesto. She writes about her writing process, development and progress and includes quite a bit about the difficulties of publishing. She also writes about how hard she works. You might find it interesting.
Thanks, Jenny. I should give her a read.