Monday, March 18, 2013

The Roller Coaster of Shipping


Plein air Painting: the book cover
Photograph and Photoshop
©2013 Charlene Brown

This is the cover of the book I've been writing over the past few months. It’s finally up for sale on Amazon and it’s in a format that allows you to read a few pages for free.  
I say ‘finally’ because when I started the process I was under the impression that publishing books in Kindle-readable format was a straightforward process – especially if you’d already written a bunch of blog posts that looked like they might flow together in an orderly manner.
I should mention before continuing that Kindle Direct Publishing really is amazingly straightforward… unless, of course, you want to put a few pictures in your book! My Kindle conversion misadventures went on for some time, until I discovered ebookpartnership.com who said they could convert my manuscript to look pretty much like the pdf I’d sent them.  But the whole thing was still pretty scary…
Then, on February 9 I saw an article by Seth Godin, The Roller Coaster of Shipping, that I found very reassuring. The article contains an annotated graph of the terrifying stages of publishing a book.  I was going through Stage 6 – “the pre-publication lizard-brain second-guess” at the time, and it was quite a revelation to learn that even Seth Godin, who has written a lot of best-selling books, would ever go through Stage 6.  AND what was even better was discovering that it would be followed by the infinitely better Stage 7 – where you realize it’s really going to happen. That is the stage I'm now enjoying!
BTW, Stage 8 is annotated, "Why haven't you read my book yet?"  Wait for it.