Threading the Maze and Starting Again

Wednesday night, I posted to Amazon myself while waiting for supper to cook. They make is quite easy if you have everything pre-formatted. The hardest decision was the price.  If I stayed with $2, they pay me 70 cents. If I make it $3, they give me $2.10.  Must be one of those IQ tests to filter out robots. Lastly, I went with a raw Word file that I had formatted for Smashwords. These things should be standard, right? Accepted. A day later, it has been Reviewed and sits in the queue for Publishing. The ripening process takes up to 72 hours total.

Oops, I didn't have a table of contents in my HTML, I was missing some tags, and my pitch had dropped a sentence. There is no way to edit even small details on your book until the publishing cycle is complete.  I had to email support to get them to stop the presses and reject it back to Draft state.  After a resubmit, we wait three more business days. Sigh. Good Friday doesn't count.

I wanted to check on the Apple posting, but couldn't see their catalog unless I downloaded their ibook application and searched from inside there. I had to ask my wife nicely if I could put it on her iphone, and then searched. I typed in my name, and nothing happened at first. Then, my book popped up.  There was a moment of great joy when it popped up on the shelf!

The joy quickly faded. The blurb they give people to sell the book at Apple uses the long pitch, not the short one, but only the first two sentences fit on the tiny iphone screen. No one would purchase based on that.  Back to the drawing board.  I will fix that today, and in two to three weeks, the corrected first sentence will appear.  I'd say "like magic" but that would be like the beanstalk in Jack and the Beanstalk being replaced by bamboo.  One type of bamboo grows something like 40 feet in five years, but most of it in the last year. Writing is like that, four years buried in dirt and fertilizer, one year reaching like crazy for the light.