I’m in the throes of putting all the various bits and pieces in place to finally get the On The Amazon series self-published. I thought the hard part would be writing the book, but I was horribly mistaken. I finished the first draft of the book in 2012, and produced a second one with the help of my hero Geoff Hope-Terry, who edited a lot of the worst errors away and kept massaging my ego when I needed it most. I even had a couple of agents say they loved it (okay, it was more like ‘it shows some promise’, but I consider this a declaration of love from an agent), but in the end it was dumped because it did not fit neatly into a mainstream genre.
Disgruntled, I shelved the project and turned to writing a novel. Then, laboriously editing and revising this, I was contacted by someone asking me if I had published On the Amazon yet. No. Why? Well, wouldn’t it be a great book for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, both to be held in Brazil? The idea had merit, and I grew to cherish it over the next year. I dumped my novel Watershed to concentrate on the non-fiction. Well, events overtook me a little, I ended up writing more and more, and eventually I had to split the book in two. Then, with memories of all those rejections, I started reading up on the self-publishing lark. It looked simple enough…
But it isn’t. At least not the first time you do it. I have scoured the internet, bought the How To books, read the dos and don’ts, and I’m still trying to wade my way through it all. I now have a long crib sheet in front of me (which is why I’m writing this post). It includes things like ISBN, Get domain, Website, Format, Front Matter, Cover, Decide KDP or go wide, and lots of other entries. Obviously as part of Website, I also have Blog and Blog posts, and here we are.
Once I’ve finished this post, I’ll be away creating some other pages and uploading some of the images and maps I thought might interest readers. I’ll be doing an ‘About’ page, too, and a page on the books (of course), with a CTA. I now know that this is not some sort of body scan, but a Call to Action to give you the irrepressible urge to visit amazon.co.uk and snap up a copy of the book (please do!)
It’s an odd sort of thing, it seems to me, to be doing all this stuff, when all I wanted to do was tell my story, but there you go. Hopefully, the second time around it will be easier 🙂
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