Done!

My two-book anthology is officially published. What a long, frustrating trip this was. Even though I still have two novels that were only published as ebooks, I don't think I could bear to go through the paperback process again. (But if I get bored enough, who knows?)

The strange thing is that formatting Running From Herself as a paperback produced no angst. There were a couple of small frustrations, such as trying to fit forty chapters onto KDP's table of contents template, but I simply deleted the table of contents all together. If one is reading a novel on paperback, use a damn bookmark!

I believe my latest problems were the result of trying to publish such a fat book (or books)-- 554 and 560 pages. The width of each book's spine resulted in off-kilter text that either bled into the spine itself or trailed off the page, until I finally figured out how to format correctly. KDP isn't in the business of making authors' lives easier; I get that, but Amazon does take a percentage of a book's royalties, so the least it could do is improve its "help" topics.

It's very true that I don't know how my paperbacks look in real life. And I won't know until I receive my proof copies. So, my triumphant dance could well be premature. I'm choosing for now to be positive about that.

Here are the books (their links are embedded in the images, if you're interested):

I don't feel pumped or proud, or any emotion, really. Don't get me wrong--the stories inside them are good. But publishing them doesn't produce the endorphins that publishing a brand new novel does. I was SO excited when I published Running From Herself. It was a wonderful feeling, albeit a fleeting one.

**And believe it or not, I already sold a copy of Touching Home!**

Regarding the book covers, GetCovers did an adequate job. I much prefer the second book's cover, except for the white text denoting the name of the series. Face it, it's almost impossible to read. In the designer's defense, I don't know what other color would have looked right. And obviously, the styles of the two books match, which I assume is important with a series (series authors tell me). I spent $70.00 in total, which should have only been $30.00, except I ordered paperback covers, too, which I was unable to use. The requisition asked for the back cover blurbs, but I didn't have them written, so while the back covers were nice and fancy, they were unusable. KDP doesn't let an author add text to a PDF (hello?) Oh, well. I can't anticipate every freakin' problem that might arise. I maybe thought I'd receive the paperback covers as JPG's, but honestly, I really didn't think about it at all.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was struggling with the second book's blurb, but I got 'er done, and it doesn't suck. Then, once I chose expanded distribution for my paperbacks, I thought about Draft2Digital's library distribution option, and although I didn't intend to tackle a new project at the end of the day, I decided to put the books up on the site and make them available to libraries. (No library has chosen to stock Running From Herself, so my chances are slim. Nevertheless.)

Well, that created a whole new set of problems. I couldn't use the Kindle Create versions, and I was too tired to realize that Kindle Create also allows one to save as an epub (dammit), so I made epubs from scratch. I will say, though, that it wasn't difficult. If I wasn't so superstitious, I probably could have formatted my paperbacks without using KDP's formatting template. But I wouldn't try it.

The hardest part of formatting a Word doc to get it ready for epub conversion was learning how to do certain things, such as inserting blank pages, centering text on a page, creating a table of contents (which matters more for an ebook than it does for a paperback). Luckily, Google was johnny-on-the-spot with answers.

Overall, for two books it went fairly quickly. Then I used calibre to convert them to epubs. It was actually more tedious to fill in D2D's many questions (BISAC? I only recently learned what that even is). All went well, and now I can pretend that libraries would want to purchase my books.

Now my job is done. Theoretically.

More than excitement, it's simply a relief.