What it's like to get a physical copy of your book

Today marks another milestone: I received my physical review copy of my novel via CreateSpace.

It was a rough day today overall for reasons I can't really get into. Suffice to say I got home from work a little before 8pm, and I think that will be the norm for the rest of this month.

Husband lectures on Tuesday and Wednesday nights for his online courses, so getting home this late was a bit of a problem - we live in a small condo and he lectures in the dining room, so I have to tread softly around the kitchen to get dinner for myself before hiding in the study or the bedroom. But he held off on starting his lecture right on time today to show me what was waiting for me at the bottom of a tall stack of junk mail: a slim package from CreateSpace.

I used my fingernails to break through the tape holding the cardboard pieces together, and there it was. My book, in print. With my name on it and everything.

Wow.

So I know what I'll be doing with the 15 minutes per day I'll have after work and before bed for the rest of this week: picking over this review copy with a fine tooth comb. It's my last shot to make it as perfect as I can get it. I already know a few things thanks to my dad's keen eye taking a last-minute look over everything.

Then, finally, it will be go-time.

It's so close I can almost feel it!

Cover Reveal: On Her Own Two Wheels!

Without further ado, I present: The cover for my first self-published novel, On Her Own Two Wheels! I incorporated as many suggestions as I could from my test subjects, so thank you so much to everyone who gave me feedback! I am extremely excited; this was one of the most difficult decisions to make, since all of the ideas I got were phenomenal, but I went with what I felt would show up best on Amazon, since that will be my primary outlet (until I make it big in publishing, of course! teehee!).

CreateSpace: The waiting is the hardest part

So, as of today, I've done the following:

Picked my cover; like, 100% settled on it

Submitted and approved the interior formatting

Received my promotional text

Corrected my cover when the wrong text was put on the back of it (I guess this was partially my fault though)

Waited.

Filled out the questionnaire for my promotional items (which now I'm wondering how long it'll take to get them and wondering why they didn't give me the questionnaire to fill out a little sooner).

Suffice to say, I'm getting a bit frustrated. Somehow, I had it in my head that this would be something like a 6 week process. Well, I started this process at the beginning August and we're now half-way through October. I kind of feel like my physical review copy should have been here about a week ago; and the last cover revision, which was really just fixing some text, somehow ended up taking over a week before that.

One thing I will say: My. Cover. Looks. Awesome. I really can't wait to show it off to the world. I'll be posting my cover reveal within the next day or two so stay tuned!

Another thing: I'm really glad I hired people to handle a lot of this stuff for me, because I think I'd get massively annoyed trying to figure it out myself. Sitting around toying with a word processor and other crappy software for hours is not my ideal pastime.

But on the other hand, I feel like this would be going faster if I were more involved. Maybe not? I don't know.

I have been feeling pretty antsy over the whole thing, though. I have barely written anything while I've been waiting for this process to move forward - I guess I kind of have target fixation. I have a kind of annoying habit where I like to work on just one thing at a time and give it my full attention. No grand multi-tasker am I. I feel incomplete if I start on something else before my original project is done. Plus, I feel like I'll forget something if my attention is too divided. But, then again, that's why I hired people to do these parts for me - so I'd have more time for other things. It's a conundrum that I need to work out.

So, now I just obsessively check my mailbox each day to see if my physical proof is here yet. I think I need to go check again just to be sure.