The Publishing Experience - What I learned last week.

I met the One Week Challenge, though technically it took me two weeks to get "Imaginary Self - A Short Story" up. I finished the first draft, as well as the editing, by the deadline; however, when we started trying to get the finishing touches on, we started having issues.

First, the original cover art my husband created wasn't working out. Halfway through creation we decided neither of us really liked it, and it didn't convey the aspects of the story that we wanted - so we scrapped it last minute and started from scratch. For those of you who like "Easter Eggs", the face used in the image is mine. It was unbelievably cool watching him distort, crack and dissipate my face for the cover! Kind of like doing a really dramatic make-up effect on Halloween.

The formatting wasn't too hard, since it's a short story, and I use the Scrivener program, which makes it insanely easy. I did have a few things that needed to be adjusted once I started uploading to Amazon, but it wasn't anything major.

We started the process of uploading to Amazon on September 4th. The formatting issues were easy to fix through the preview function but the cover was showing up completely inverted - like a negative on a color photograph (you remember those right? Before digital photos took over the world lol!) It took awhile to figure out that the .Tiff image wasn't getting read properly. Still not certain why. We changed it to a .Jpeg and it corrected. Unfortunately, we lost some of the vibrancy in the cover's color when we changed the file-type. The background was originally a stunning shade of maroon, but it still looks pretty cool regardless, so I won't complain too much.

I decided to sell it for 99¢ since it's a short story - roughly 24 pages (Amazon says 22, but whatever...) I don't think it makes sense to sell a short for more than that. Granted, I'm only making 35¢ per book, but that seems sufficient for the length.

We finished the uploading process on September 5th and it took about 18 hours to complete, officially going live on Thursday morning, September 6th. After going live, I started trying to get the word out - my marketing has been limited. I posted on my Facebook, here on my blog, added it to Goodreads, plugged it on Google+ and Twitter, spread across the past few days. So far the Amazon report says I've sold 6 copies, though I've been told by many more people that they've gotten a copy. Amazon states that the report updates automatically, but after further digging, I found out it updates as payments are processed, not necessarily when a book is purchased. I'm interested to see how the number of copies sold updates after the weekend when banks and credit cards usually process weekend purchases and take them out of pending status.

It has been a pretty great and informative experience so far. Going through the self-publishing process from start to finish has been highly encouraging. Now that I'm better acquainted with it, I'm eager and ready to get back to work on my novel to get "Firechild" up there alongside it.