Decision Time…

Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything about my progress, so here goes:

I’ve finally settled on a final version of my text. It’s not something that meets with conventional norms for selling books, but I’ve also decided that I’m not doing this to get rich… I’m doing this to fulfil a personal desire, a bucket-list thing, and to get the satisfaction of saying “I did it”. The manuscript is long (474pgs, 6×9, garamond 9pt, 208k words). I tried about 40-50 agents and it didn’t click with any of them, and so now I’m going the self-publishing route.

And with that splendid decision, I’ve spent the last week pulling my hair out trying to figure out things like size, trim, font, formatting (the original MS was done in MSWord – don’t hate me for being a noob). This also meant that the more I learned, the more refining I had to do, playing with font sizes and document formatting to understand exactly how many pages I was looking at, and going through the MS with a fine tooth comb each time to make sure the formatting changes hadn’t caused havoc with chapters and page breaks…

Then I learned about ISBN codes = I had heard good things from people using IngramSpark, but they required I enter ISBN codes before anything would happen so I made the submission to Library and Archives Canada and got an ISBN for each of the paperback and ebook versions… (big thank you to someone in the Cambridge Authors Group for sharing that the LAC issues ISBNs in Canada for free!)

..but now I am getting error codes as the IS site doesn’t consider the ISBNs I entered to be valid…?!? (They’re valid enough on one screen to download a cover generator template, but not good enough to actually set-up the books in my profile so I can upload the text…?)

So, next I started exploring KDR for how to publish, and was making good progress until I started reading the Tax section of their account set-up: can’t see any way that I could figure out in this lifetime how to comply with the stuff they had posted there as a Canadian/non-US resident (…If anyone has any tips or tricks on an easy way to do this, I would welcome any advice…).

Now I am looking at something like Blurb, which I’ve heard can be easy even though I’ve also heard concerns about the quality of the bindings.

While looking at self-publishing platforms, I also downloaded a free-trial of InDesign from Adobe to format a cover. I have front cover art but need to layout the rest (spine, back cover). I had downloaded a template from IngramSpark based on the size of the MS, and it set-up a barcode that included the sales price I had originally calculated for selling copies, integrating the ISBN code, too (this had seemed like a good idea at the time, before the rest of the site rejected the ISBNs). Pretty sure that won’t be transferrable to using anywhere else when it comes to presenting a cover.

And just in case it seemed like everything was going kaput, I registered for a webinar from IngramSPark on “How to price and sell your book”, only to login and see that the video feed from their end was busted, and even the recoding won’t play for me. (Some times, it seems like all the world is conspiring against me getting this done! …if that doesn’t sound too vain?