My book came out...YAY! But it made me crazy...boo!

I came out with a book today. Not really a book, but a Boxed Set of my Him Her Them series. It does contain an extra story about Luna and Corbin. So, there is more to it than just cutting and pasting my previous work together.

The stupid thing about it is that I really believed it was going to be super easy compiling this set together. What was I thinking? It has been the most technically challenging published book of mine to date. Not only did I need to re-edit the previous three novellas (Grading Him, Reaching Her & Becoming Them), but I also had to write another story, edit it, send it off to my editor (who wanted revisions, which then had to be edited again), and then compile all this together into a book.

And that was the easy part! When I made it one file to upload to Amazon and Smashwords for publication all sorts of glitches happened. At one point one chapter had completely different formatting than the other 48 other chapters. So, I had to go into each chapter and format everything again to make sure it all matched.

Formatting a manuscript for publication usually takes me half a day, sometimes up to a full day depending how busy I am with the kids or how big the book is. This took three days. I wanted to have the book available for pre-order last week, which obviously didn't happen.

The cherry on the Boxed Set cake is that Smashwords keeps coming up with problems as to why they can’t send it off to other retailers to sell (I don’t have a particular word capitalized that isn’t even in the book but on my book webpage -Really? My image is 3D for the book cover instead of 2D which is required – impossible as I don’t know how to make a 3D image and I created the book cover). At least Amazon knows the difference between a 2D image and 3D image and has published my book right in time.

Sorry that this post is a rant, but it’s been a crazy week.  At least you learn (if you are an indie author or thinking of becoming one) what can go wrong and try to prepare well in advance. Basically, learn from my mistakes.