Karen J Carlisle/ Off the Art board: When things don't quite go to plan

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

When things don't quite go to plan - but turn out alright anyway

Well, this is interesting.

Last time I published an eBook, via Smashwords and Draft 2 Digital (and listed it on Goodreads and my website bookshop), the entire process took about 3-7 days to sort itself out. With this in mind, and now my Patreon Adventurer Extraordinaire and above tiers have got their patron reward copy of the eBook, I started the process for Another Twist of the Nib.

I began with Draft 2 Digital, as there have been issues on Amazon’s end for three of my eBooks. I was quite happy to have them chug away and expected not to get any results until the weekend while I sorted the rest…

Well, knock my socks off!

The Draft 2 Digital publication went through without a hitch (I thought Amazon would block the process as there was a small ‘freely available’ excerpt of the final short, The Case of the Murderous Migraine, online for it’s first publication in Deadsteam, 2018). I emailed the very helpful Tara, at D2D, to warn her of the (<5%) excerpt. She made a note of it. (I am extremely pleased with D2D’s customer service, btw.)

well… This time it all went through without a hitch. It went through (thanks to Tara’s note to the Amazon vetters/reviewers). Squee.

Thus began the process of adding Another Twist of the Nib to my Amazon author page. It took a day to be visible to add to the page via Amazon’s author central. Next, there’s usually there’s a 2-7 day wait for it to process and become visible on my author page on Amazon’s website. Blow me over with a feather; it popped up within three hours!

In the meantime, I uploaded to Smashwords (to distribute to Kobo, Apple Books, B&N etc) This can usually be done in half a day (though it takes longer to be approved for Apple Books). Today it was a tad quicker. I then assigned an ISBN and it was all go, go, go!

I popped over to Books 2 Read to check out my links listing… Again, it seemed to be a much faster process this time round (not waiting for Amazon make a huge difference). So you can check out the links listing HERE already!

I’ve now made the eBook listing public in my website page, with both the Smashwords direct and the link listing link, and added the eBook to my Goodreads listing.

A process that took me over a week previously, has taken just 24 hours this time. To say I’m surprised is definitely an understatement.

So, a good surprise. Definitely less stress this time round. (am wondering what I haven’t noticed has gone wrong). But also a tad annoying, as I’d hoped my patrons to have their reward copy at least a week before it was online. My apologies to you all.

Here is the complete list of links: