Whither “False Confessions”? (or, How Fast Can You Kindle?)

I know, I hadn’t planned on publishing anything until April, so it was a surprise when Strange Animal released a story collection, False Confessions, False Alarms, this past Saturday. It was also a bit of a surprise to me.  Thing is, I had a little time on my hands, so I thought I’d take some old material that hadn’t really seen the light of day, and see how quickly I could turn out a book that looked pretty okay.

Pretty quickly, as it turns out, as long as the material is already written and edited. I’ve had these works of short fiction sitting around collecting dust (and rejection slips), so why not parcel them into a document and get them out there? I basically pasted them into Word, auto-generated an active Table of Contents, formatted according to the directions for Kindle Documents on Amazon’s website, did a quick scan-through for typos etc., and saved.

I also some old ‘fake alchemy’ image files (another example below) from an ancient project, so I photo-shopped it into a fun-looking cover. Then, after uploading the files and making sure the preview files looked good, I hit ‘publish.’

 

From start to finish, the whole design and editing process took about four hours (maybe). After hitting publish, it takes about 12 hours for Amazon to review the work, then about 12 hours for it to be published to Amazon’s site. This means, from the beginning of the design/formatting process to the moment of publication, we can put out a title for Kindle in approximately 30 hours.

That. Is. Awesome.

Now then: there are some sacrifices I made for the sake of speed. For instance, I’ve already noticed a few extra spaces in the body of the text, that I could have caught and fixed, but these are pretty minor in the scheme of things.  Also, this turnaround time only applies to Amazon’s Kindle program, which means we don’t need an ISBN and it isn’t available on paper. If we were publishing using a different service, or publishing in print, it would be a much longer process. Still, anybody can read Kindle titles using the various Kindle apps available, so yeah, to compensate for any limitations of quality, I decided to price-point it at $0.99 (which means I see $0.35 in royalties from each purchase). But, it also means you get a selection of quality tales for a pittance!

Since it’s a $0.99 title, I decided not to include it in the perks for the IndieGoGo campaign; those perks will apply to more ‘official’ titles that will benefit from the whole

Thanks for indulging me in my little ‘speed publishing’ experiment; I hope you’ll head to Amazon and download a copy of False Confessions, False Alarms today!