Ebooks!

I am not a particularly patient person. I’m also not particularly fond of hassling people. You can imagine, therefore, my state of mind over this past week, waiting for Lulu customer service to tell me what the hell was wrong with my book and why it wasn’t showing up anywhere except Lulu. (At least it’s been a distraction from the US election, which has also had a certain ‘hurry up and wait’ quality to it. US friends, you have my deep respect. When there are elections on over here, I usually go to bed half an hour after polls close so that I can face whatever joy or gloom the morning might bring on a decent night’s sleep. I don’t know how I’d have coped with this endless election week that you’ve had to go through.)

Well, I got a reasonably helpful response from one person. I acted on their suggestions and uploaded the new file. It took me a while to get the thing to recognise that this was a new submission. It gave me an ‘Error approving your project for distribution’ message within a minute. It did not tell me why. Nor did customer service.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lulu kept spitting the book back at me, giving me no indication as to what might have failed. Yesterday I gave up, retired the ebook from Lulu, and made myself an account on Smashwords instead. Smashwords also kept spitting the book back at me, but it did tell me that it didn’t like my numbered lists.

There are no numbered lists in The Real World.

This was almost as frustrating, but I eventually tracked the problem down to the chapter headings. By this point it was getting on for midnight, so I gave up and went to bed.

This morning I deleted all the chapter headings, put them all back in as body text, and made a hyperlinked table of contents with my own fair hands. And here we go.

It’s now waiting for manual review, which won’t happen over the weekend, but my hope is that it’ll be fairly quick next week. And if there still are any problems with the file then at least a manual reviewer will be able to tell me what they are. If not, it should then start filtering out to more mainstream suppliers.

I should say at this point that Amazon won’t be one of those, unless I manage to sell seriously vast numbers through Smashwords. So I need to work out what to do about that. The MOBI is available from Smashwords in the meantime, and the paperback is staying on Amazon.

The great irony is that I got everything done – or so I thought – in September, and then sat on it to give it a chance to get through the distribution channels.

Well, look, you’d have thought so too if your book had been sitting there all that time with a little message saying ‘Your project has been approved for distribution’. It’s only since I started asking politely why it wasn’t showing on any of the other platforms, and why, come to that, both the other two had started falling off, that the ‘Error approving your project for distribution’ message appeared.

Now I need to work out what to do next. I’ll probably move the other ebooks over to Smashwords too, beginning with Speak Its Name. I also need to work out how I feel about Kindle Direct: i.e. whether I think I’ll sell enough ebooks through Amazon, given the fact that Smashwords does a decent MOBI file, to make it worth getting my head round it. (I’d be interested to hear from Kindle owners on this, though I make no promises.) But this is not a decision to make before I’ve had a cup of coffee. I’m off to make one now. In the meantime, here’s The Real World.