I had decided to publish the first book this week – I have always wanted the books to come out within a few months of each other, and I think this fits the pipeline speed that I have right now. The second book is with a beta reader and the third book is at 13,000 words.
Plus I have been off work this week. Given that that the first fifty people to read this book are all going to be people who know me and just want to see what I did. . . I kind of figured it’d be fun to answer the question “what did you do with your week off?” with “oh, published my first book.”
A few things have gone slower than expected. One is this blog – I’ve been writing it using a domain name that was pretty much random (I am terrible at naming things) and just parking the official domain to it, so that the real domain (katerosenberg.net) wouldn’t show up in search too soon. This was fine, but I bought the official domain on a different platform than I want to use long term (lured in by the sales price, silly me) and it’s going to take longer to sort out than expected. My fault, I should have ported it over weeks ago.
The other thing is that I had purchased my own ISBN to use for the paperback – I’m not sure if this was a good investment or not, my research was pretty split on the topic. But that was my decision, so before I could hit “publish” I had to finish the ISBN registration via an online form. I assumed this was automatic after submission, so was bummed to discover that I would have to wait for the information to be accepted before I could proceed. (Amazon will let you use your own ISBN, but will verify ownership, so I didn’t want to start the Amazon process before this was done.)
But this morning I woke up stupid early with a headache, and before I’d even got out of bed I checked my ISBN registration – and it was complete!
So after coffee, to make sure I didn’t make any super weird decisions, I submitted both the paperback and ebook formats to Amazon for publication! Now it’s a matter of waiting for Amazon to approve the content, layout, ISBN, etc., which can take up to 72 hours if there are no issues; longer if their software detects an issue. If there is an issue, I suspect it will be with the ISBN, just because this is the place where a small mismatch in how I typed my address or some other datum could cause the system to throw a rejection. I do not expect humans are looking at any of this.
Now I just have to wait and see what happens. I hope it goes smoothly, but it’s out of my hands!