The triumphs and headaches of a book launch

OK, yes, I've been amiss about blogging again lately. Bite me! June was basically insane. I had to get the final edits done on Space Junk for a 4 July release, and we had 700 bales of hay that were harvested from our fields. Not to mention record breaking heat that left us all wilted after only a few hours in the sun. It was a rough month. July has only been slightly better. Case in point- launching a book.

Some folks are superstitious, some are sentimental. I'm a little of both. If you read any of my books, you will always see I end on an even numbered chapter. It's not superstition, just a personal quirk. I also like to occasionally publish on relevant days- like Christmas, my birthday, and my latest attempt was 4 July. Good intentions never seem to work, especially when you are working with other companies in this venture. There are also the time zone issues- where are the company servers? 

After deciding that I wanted to launch Space Junk on the 4th, I set in motion everything I needed to do in order to make that possible. I loaded everything into my accounts on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I knew Smashwords was an immediate upload and would be done as soon as I hit the publish button and it ran through the "meat grinder." But I didn't take into consideration that SW is a west coat company. I stayed up well past midnight (EST) to get all my books with a 4 July publication date. Yeah, right! I guess I should've stuck to my other plan: getting up about 4 a.m. to do the deed on the 4th. 

Each company has different time lags to publish your book. If you upload at Amazon KDP or BN, your title may take 12-24 hours to go live. CreateSpace is supposed to be instant upon approving your proof copy (digital or hard copy) But the paper copy showed up a day later. And SW is live ASAP, so I knew I needed to wait. Everything was a crap-shoot, and I rolled a 7.

The result of this whole well-thought plan: I ended up with having all versions (except BN) with a 3 July publication date. Was I mad? Yup. Email to the companies didn't produce anything, and I didn't have the time to be able to unpublish and fix everything and have it come out right. Lesson learned. 

My next book, The Hall, I'm aiming for a release on Halloween. Therein lies another problem. If I want to release the book on 31 Oct, and I actually might be holding a signing event, then I need some copies beforehand to have available. Now I'm asking myself how can I pull that one off? Maybe I'll just have to suck up the fact that maybe the print version will come out a little earlier so I can get copies. It's always something!

Enough of my grumbling. Here's an update on the farm: Flynn (the wayward Weimariner) is now living with us. If you haven't seen my FB posts, the injured bunny was released with no problems. My baby bat is getting quite enthusiastic about eating--just wish it would be more enthusiastic about flying! My corn is about knee-high and has 20+ more days before we're supposed to be eating it--if the deer don't get to it first. All the baby barn swallows died- mites drove them crazy and they jumped out of the nest and mommy wouldn't care for them anymore. Plans are to put cedar chips under the hay loft stairs for next year and hope that keeps the mites down. Have another nest of some small birds in the wash stall. They seem to be doing fine.

Farm life and self-publishing both have their headaches and heartaches. Neither of them pay particularly well. But I love both and keep at them.

Until next time, my creatively obsessed friends,

Kathy

http://www.amazon.com/Space-Junk-Dars-Adventures-ebook/dp/B008HAK4VA/ref=la_B003H2UCNI_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341600665&sr=1-1

 Flynn

 Bales waiting to be picked up

 The wood rabbit that got caught in a fence

"Bitey" having a mealworm for dinner