Well, This Was a Nightmare - My Paperback Upload

This is not my first go-round with publishing a paperback. (It's my second.) The first time I did it, it was a piece of cake, relatively speaking. Miblart had provided me with a perfect paperback cover version, and my only problem was in formatting the back cover blurb, which was due to my own cluelessness. But I managed to get it right eventually, and that was that.

Oh, boy, not this time!

The process was going quite smoothly--until I got to the cover section. Well, my damn margins were wrong, I was told, and I could not proceed until I fixed them. Since I was dealing with the cover, I assumed KDP was talking about the cover's margins being wrong, so I tried to figure out a way to correct that. I was working with a PDF (the only format KDP allows), but how do I change the margins on a PDF without purchasing an Acrobat subscription (that I would only use once; twice at the most)? And even if I did buy one, change the margins to what? I had no idea. Well, you can't mess with a PDF's margins (or any other part of a PDF) for free. That turned out to be lucky for me, because it was the manuscript's margins that needed fixing. I didn't realize that until I was about an hour into the process.

So, I pulled up my formatted Word doc and guessed at what the margins should be. I chose "wide", because KDP's preview showed me that the words were bleeding into the middle section, where the book's spine was located. My addled brain figured narrow copy would fit neatly on the page, although it would surely increase the number of pages, which was already topping off at over 600. Again, luckily for me, that didn't work, either. The printing costs were already too high without adding pages.

In between staring at my PDF book cover and clicking willy-nilly on my manuscript's margins to guess at what they should be, I tried changing the entire size of the paperback from 6x9 to...something else I can't remember. Then I tried changing "no bleed" to "bleed" (whatever the hell that means). Nope.  

I should also mention that it wouldn't accept my nice cover PDF that GetCovers had designed, for which I paid $35.00, so I had to upload the ebook cover, choose Cover Creator and try to match the back cover color to the front. I ended up with a shade of purple, but it, of course, doesn't have the nice artwork (or any artwork) that the GetCovers design has.  

After an hour, I finally found some directions for changing the margins of my Word doc to the correct size, which involved adjusting the inside and gutters and stuff I don't remember now.

If this didn't work, I was done. I was giving up.

But it worked!🕑 I don't know how well it worked, because I haven't seen the finished product, but at least KDP accepted the manuscript and allowed me to move ahead. 

When I got to pricing, I made sure to click on "expanded distribution", so the book could be made available on Bookshop and to libraries (although both those avenues have been a bust for me). Then I decided I'd price the paperback reasonably, whereas I'd been told via some online boards that $19.99 was the sweet spot for a book the length of mine. I figured, though, no one's going to buy it at that price (well, candidly, at any price), so I landed on $15.36. Again, nope! Too low. I was finally forced to go with $20.86. (I don't know where someone got the $19.99 figure, because KDP wouldn't allow it.)

Audiobook? AI-narrated? Sure, why not? It's free (to me). It's not as if I'm going to be scouting the internet for a $3,000.00 real-life narrator. I briefly played around with the voice selections, then decided since the book contains four stories, I'd pick a different narrator for each one. Truthfully, all the voices sound pretty much the same. But the very slight differences at least give a hint of delineation between stories. This took about two minutes of my time, because I was tired and stressed by this point, and didn't much care.

My ebook was published yesterday, but that also did not go smoothly. I mean, the upload went fine--it's a pretty easy process--but once I was informed that the book was live, I pulled it up and no cover image showed. Great selling point! I kept refreshing and trying different browsers, but it was true; my book had no cover. So I initiated a chat, but all Pramesh (or whoever) could tell me was to wait 72 hours. I've never had this issue before, with, damn...at least 15 different uploads (including the books that I've since unpublished). But okay; I'll wait. But not too long. No, I didn't forget to upload the cover. It's there when I click "read sample". 

I don't know what's happened with KDP, but for sure nothing good. 

For authors who publish paperbacks all the time, I'm sure the process seems quite smooth. That's a hallucination. The process is a nightmare. And the wonderful part is, I get to do it all over again once Book 2 is ready to go!

I pity the fool who attempts this for the first time...well, actually, I pity me, because it wasn't my first time, but it was a whole new surreal experience.