Today I received a hard copy of my first book - 'Briefs - A collection of short stories'. I was excited, it looked good to see my name in print.
It was not until I flicked through the pages that my elation turned into deflation. More formatting is needed.
To all those who say self publishing is easy, I beg to differ. Perhaps it is ignorance on my part (probably), but self publishing is anything but easy. Maybe it should be thought of as accessible instead of easy.
So far I have spent hours in formatting the draft book (that is after months of writing the stories and putting the book together) to meet the criteria of margins etc. only to find I have more work ahead of me. For some reason the manuscript is not co-opearting with me and there are still first line indents too far to the right or not there at all.
I take my hat off to all those who have self published and written about it. You make it sound so easy. When reading my KDP newsletter the other day I was impressed to read about an author who self published after years of rejection slips and sold 250,000 books in about twelve months. Wow. The way I am going I will be lucky to get to the starting gate, let alone sell one book.
Here I am no closer to self publishing than I was six months ago.
Fingers crossed I will get my head around the current formatting problems and re-submit the manuscript within a week and try again.
I will keep you posted on my progress.
In the meantime I can thoroughly recommend a lecture series called 'How to write better sentences." The presenter discusses sentences and how to improve them by making them longer. Well worth a read.
Signing off for the night to try more formatting and font styles (any hints on good fonts for books welcome) I will leave you with another photo of the beautiful Mornington Peninsula.
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