How Hard Can This Be?

Well, I ended up not having nightmares, but I sure am having a lot of anxiety.

Since I didn’t get any error alerts on KDP when I uploaded the manuscript the first time, I was certain it would be smooth sailing this time as well. After all, aside from fixing a few spelling errors, everything else was exactly the same and I had been able to order a proof copy with no problem.

Once the corrected manuscript was uploaded I very nervously hit “publish”.  I’d have to wait about 72 hours for the book to pass a quality check, but I wasn’t worried. I was full of excitement that my book would be live in a few days, but also full of anxiety that there might be one big, fat, glaring error I failed to catch, but now it would be on my published version, and from what I understand, that is not an easy fix.

I was pretty excited to find an email from KDP early the next morning and I thought “HOLY HECK – my book is live already!”

I opened the email.

Hold up – errors need to be fixed? Big ones. The kind that meant I’d probably have to create a whole new document and basically create the book all over again. “Deep breaths. You did it once, just fix the margins and you can place all the content in just the same way, won’t take too long.” Perhaps the issues weren’t as big as they seemed, but for someone like me, who is quite tech-challenged with this stuff -I knew it might be days worth of work to sort it all out.

Now, I’ve been struggling through just about every part of this process from day one, so why would I have thought for a second this part would be any easier? And WHY is there a problem now I wondered. How could this be? Why weren’t there issues with the proof?

I decided to take the lazy way out and NOT redo the whole document, but just tweak a few of the images that looked like they may not have been placed correctly. It was a last ditch effort to save myself some time, so I went ahead and hit that upload button.

For some reason, the upload button on the KDP site wasn’t working. Like at all, for more than an hour. I tried logging out and logging back in, refreshing the page, walking away for a while – still, nothing. Finally, I did a little investigating and came across an article that suggested changing browsers. Huh? Well, ok. I switched to Safari and for some reason, that did the trick. 

Again, I uploaded the manuscript. Again, I hit that “publish” button. And again I waited for that (dreaded) email from KDP telling me I had errors that needed to be fixed.

Then came the dreaded email from KDP:

This time it worked! My book was live! I actually did a little happy dance, in my head. So much relief at not having to reconfigure the whole document.

And yet, here I am again, nervously waiting for the authors copy to arrive, not sure what to expect. I have a few days to stew in my anxiety, second guessing myself. Fingers crossed I didn’t mess anything up by fidgeting with those images.

To be continued…

In the meantime; Are you interested in knowing what goes into self-publishing a book on Amazon? Or maybe you’ve done so already. Maybe you have done it through another platform. I’d be interested to know your thoughts, opinions, or advice!