Oh Yeah! I Published a Book!

I'm doing this all kinds of backwards. I mean, really, I didn't have months of anticipatory build-up before my release date. I mainly just told people I know - "Hey! I'm releasing a book in a few weeks!" (that was back in August; it's now November; gosh am I glad I didn't post an official release date way back then). And last night, after going over my most recent proof, I was half-delerious from exhaustion, half-giddy from FINALLY being ready to pull the trigger, that I hit "Publish My Book" on CreateSpace... and then collapsed into bed.

I'm certain I'll do this right next time around. I will do a blog tour and host other writers on my blog that I manage to network with so I can be a good member of my community. I'll set an official "Release Date." I'll hire a real editor. I'll do some other awesome promotional stuff.

But this time around - I learned the Process. And it was really good. I feel about 75% smarter than I was in January and the bulk of that I learned since July. I have a realistic idea of time frames; I have a realistic idea of how much time I  have to designate to this project myself. I see what it takes; and I can't wait to take it on again. Bigger, better, and unplugged. (or something)

That said - I'm still insanely excited about this book. I'm excited that I've dipped my toe in the water; I'm excited to learn what I can do better next time - writing-wise, cover-design wise, everything-wise. But I'm also just excited that this fun little story has a place to go other than on my hard drive. I hope it is good for a smile, a relaxing little foray into another person's world for a few hours, and maybe even a little bit of inspiration.

Purchase Now on CreateSpace

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!

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.

CreateSpace: The Next Steps

So, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Truth be told, though, there hasn't been tons to tell. It's tough being in the "hurry up and wait" phase, but I've found ways to pass the time (that haven't involved hitting "refresh" on my CreateSpace page every 5 minutes; no, really).

Well, we left off (I think) with me hitting "submit" on my questionnaire and specifications. I also uploaded my manuscript - that was a bit of a project, though. I write my novels in Scrivener, and to use the CreateSpace services, they recommend you upload your manuscript in Word. So I had to convert it over, which is an imperfect process, and then add some formatting elements to ensure the translation worked well. This leads me to a caveat: if you plan on using CreateSpace, it'd be a good idea to write your novel using Word to begin with, or at least use a program that converts to Word pretty easily. I love Scrivener, though, so I think I'll just build in the conversion to my expected workload in publishing a book with their tools (and work on learning how to do it right; I think I figured it out, but it took some fiddling and I still had to go through and double-check everything).

So, after all the submissions had been made on my end, I cooled my heels until the best day ever: my cover concepts came in.

I cannot tell you what an emotional experience that was. I know it's a little silly, but getting to see the cover ideas for my book, with the title and my name and everything, was one of the most exciting moments in this whole process.

Until I then had to agonize over which one I was going to pick.

I polled several people in my target demographic before making my decision. I got a lot of great input from folks, but ultimately I had to make a very tough choice. I can't wait til it launches and I can show it off!

CreateSpace uploads your cover concepts to your project toolbox, where you can view them and then select which one you want to use. You're allowed to request a certain number of changes or a third concept if you don't like either one. I requested a few changes to my chosen cover design, which I'm supposed to get back in another few days for final approval.

In addition to my covers, I also received the internal formatting file so I could review and make sure the page layouts were done correctly and looked good. This includes things like chapter headers, spacing, the little symbols between separate sections of the chapter (what're those called again?), etc. I got mine back and it was also AWESOME. It wasn't just a few random pages off of a PDF - it had my name on each page and the title of the book on each page, just like a real book. These are things that make me go "squee", people. It's things like these you don't even probably notice when you are reading, and it just tickles me.

I had to send in my initial approval of the internal formatting and will get a final review of it when they send me my physical review copy.

Finally, they also sent me my promotional text. This was something I really debated about doing - after all, I'm a writer, how tough can it be to do promotional text? But the truth is, I can't do stuff like that without feeling campy and ridiculous. It felt about 100% better to have someone do it for me, and I'm glad I did it. I didn't like all of the choices they made and I edited a few parts pretty heavily, but just having that launching point saved me hours of time agonizing over it myself. They did a pretty good job, though the concise-writer part of me just had to tweak it (srsly, there were quite a few run-on sentences, be on the lookout).

Sooo. My promotional text is all approved, my book cover is almost done, the internal formatting is completed. Next: Physical review copy, and then onward to my final approval and marketing products! Gah it's so exciting I just can't stand it!

CreateSpace: And then...

So Sunday night I pulled the trigger and requested the package I wanted from CreateSpace, including some basic cover design, some publicity materials, a book review, some layout help, etc. On Monday, the consultant I'm working with put everything into my CreateSpace account shopping cart and I logged in last night to purchase and set up the logistics.

That part was fairly simple - you just log into your account, go to your cart, pay, and there you go. What happens next is a change in your Member Dashboard. Backing up a second, CreateSpace has a certain process for setting up books. You create your "project" (i.e. one of your titles), upload some files, select some settings, etc. When you sign up for the extra features, you have to go through one of their publishing consultants to get them activated, but then it just expands your dashboard for that project so you have more options.

I had to fill out a questionnaire with details about the options I picked - things like what I envision for the cover, what I want the tone of my promotional materials to be, summaries of my book, etc. I also selected my internal formatting templates, fonts, and how I wanted my front matter to appear (those are the first few pages inside any book stating the author, title, dedication, copyright, etc).

This has all been pretty intuitive so far, so I'm looking forward to the next steps and seeing what my project team puts together. After making your selections and filling out the questionnaire, little clock icons appear next to those segments of your project dashboard to show that your project team is working on their different elements and will notify you when you need to do something else. So now it's just some hurry up and wait.

CreateSpace: the next step

A few weeks ago I sent my wish list to CreateSpace of what kind of package I wanted for my upcoming novel (which is really more of a novella). This includes cover design services, formatting, some promotional odds and ends, etc.

It took them a while to get back to me, and since then, the email containing their suggestions and pricing has been sitting in my inbox. Taunting me.

The truth is, the price tag is pretty high, at least for someone like me. It'll be tough to recoup my entire investment, and I've been waffling back and forth, weighing the pros and cons.

Well, tonight I finally decided to go for it. 

To be honest, the reason is that I am really looking for a more turn-key operation, and I can't think of a better way to do it. All of the successful projects I've ever started have usually involved me hiring someone to take care of the parts that I know I just don't have the time, patience, and inclination to do myself.

Example: I wanted to start a Facebook app. I thought about it for a year. I bought a book about Facebook app programming. I made sketches. I tried to learn about design work. Finally, I just bit the bullet and hired someone to program and design it for me. I launched it. It didn't do too badly; but it wouldn't have even launched if I hadn't had somebody else program it for me. Once all I had left to do was the marketing, I actually enjoyed it. The same is true here. I could try to learn about cover design, how to do the artwork myself; I could mess with my manuscript software until I manage to successfully export a properly formatted document; I could find a way to outsource printing properly branded bookmarks, business cards, and other materials; I could agonize over promotional text for hours.

Or I could have some of those tasks done for me, and focus on the parts I like to do.

Granted, I understand I have lots of work ahead of me. But it's nice to know that at least some of these details can be taken care of by people with (hopefully) better taste and more experience than me.

So, I'll report back once I really get the ball rolling and let you know how everything goes. I believe my next step will just be selecting each option that I want as I go through the setup process on CreateSpace, but I may get a few extras for buying the package I want to buy, so it's worth speaking with the consultants to get suggestions and a few little perks here and there.

Maybe it's the holiday

Well, with my own multiple rounds of editing done on my novel, I don't have much to do at present while I await my fabulous volunteer editors to send me feedback. As such, I decided to try and make some progress on other areas of the self-publishing process, namely familiarizing myself with how exactly to publish an eBook, make a book available for print-on-demand (POD), cover art, a little publicity, etc.

Given my unpredictable work schedule and my lack of patience for technology when I can't seem to get it to work properly, I decided it might be a good idea to pay somebody to do some of this stuff for me. In particular, I'm pretty sure I have no idea what constitutes good cover art. I can barely dress myself in matching colors every morning, let alone design something visually pleasing for an entire demographic. So I looked around, but the easiest services seemed to be with CreateSpace, given that I'll be targeting Amazon mostly with my first go. I don't know how they compare price-wise and I haven't been able to find too many reviews on the quality of their work. I'm hoping to document some of my experiences just so other people navigating their services might benefit from knowing what to expect.

So, I went on the CreateSpace website, which was pretty easy to navigate, and I started looking at what they offer. They provide services in various categories from marketing to editing and other miscellaneous tidbits, so I compiled a list of what I was most interested in. A few areas indicated you can get favorable pricing if you bundle services, so I then hopped on over to their "contact us!" link and composed my inquiry. I explained a bit about my book (genre, small synopsis, etc) and listed the services I was interested in.

The next morning, I received an email from a CreateSpace Publishing Associate thanking me for my interest and attempting to put me in contact with a Publishing Consultant that would work with me to determine which package would be best for my needs. The Associate also left me a voicemail on the phone number I provided with pretty much the same information. This was Tuesday, the day before the 4th of July. I didn't get any contact from the Publishing Consultant that day, so on my day off on Wednesday, I sent her a quick email to see how we could coordinate a phone consultation (obviously not anticipating a same-day response due to the holiday).

Well, it's now Saturday. They work M-F 9-5 EST. I haven't heard anything back since that initial email. My guess is that the Consultant I was paired with is probably out for the week on vacation for the 4th of July holiday. It's just odd that for a big company like Amazon they wouldn't have to put up an email auto-responder if they are out of the office. My plan is to give it til this coming Tuesday before I get fussy (I can give it a day for someone to catch up on emails after being out of the office).

Sadly I don't really have anything else to report. Looking forward to getting the ball rolling. If CreateSpace doesn't pan out and anyone knows of anything comparable, at the very least for book cover & formatting services, please let me know!