Messed Up By Trusting "Experts"

I did my research regarding paperback formatting services; I really did. $147.00 is a lot of money for me, especially to have one paperback formatted for KDP. Thus, I went with Atticus. That was a mistake. 

Let me start by saying their interface is terrible. There is absolutely nothing to guide an author through the process. You can get through it, but it requires a lot of guessing and a lot of false starts. And Google's AI answers are misleading at best. "How do I add front matter, such as a dedication and an epigraph?" "Just click on the button." There is no button! There aren't any buttons! There is a little house icon that takes me back to my uploaded manuscript and sends me into an endless loop of clicking and being brought back to my upload, and clicking again, hoping this time it will take me somewhere else.

Finally, I surmised that the only way to add these elements, including an "about the author" page was to go back to my Word document and add them there, then format them as chapter headings and re-upload. Great, but now Atticus labeled them as chapters. "Chapter One, Dedication". Just hopeless. So, I went back to my Word doc and took them out, then re-uploaded.

I never did get a formatted novel I was completely satisfied with, but by then I'd spent a couple hours on the project, so I just accepted it for what it was and went about uploading it to KDP.  

Oops ~ upload failed. I tried about five more times, getting the same message every time. KDP didn't tell me why it failed; just that it did. I then opened the PDF I got from Atticus and compressed it. (I have no idea what that even means, but Google said, yes, it needs to be compressed.) Nope ~ upload failed.

Now I'm out $147.00. My manuscript hardly exceeds the maximum megabytes; not even close, so the file is obviously not too big. I could contact Atticus's help department, but what are they going to tell me? "Oh, sorry. Well, we already got your money, so..."

And here I thought getting a cover resized was going to be my big obstacle. Not at all. I did use KDP's cover creator and it only took about four tries to get it right. And it uploaded without a hitch.

So, where does that leave me? Lost, basically. Somehow I found a KDP formatting template (wish I'd found it sooner), which I downloaded, but when I tried to edit it, it told me it was read-only. Well, I think I managed to work around that, then save it to my hard drive. And that's where I stopped. I'd spent hours and hours on the project already and had nothing left to give. I was exhausted.

I'll try it out as soon as I have the energy, but as my track record has proven, that won't work, either. 

I could have spent $147.00 on marketing, if I wanted to throw money away. I could have marketed my ebook and done away with the whole paperback notion all together. I would need to make thirty-three sales of my ebook just to recoup my foolhardy expenditure. That's not going to happen. I'll be lucky to sell one copy at full price.

I see my options as follows:

1. Dump my manuscript into KDP's template and pray that it works.

2. Contact Atticus for help, which will likely be pointless.

3. Chalk it all up as a stupid idea and give up.

And all because I wanted to hold a physical copy of my book in my hands.