Wednesday 19 February 2014

It's out!!!!!

Well - after a few hiccups like forgetting to put my name on it as the author Milele Safari is now available in Kindle format and on sale on Amazon!

It will eventually go out on NOOK (Barnes & Noble) and Apple iBooks but it's enough to get it on the virtual shelves of Amazon so I'm not about to cry into my beer anymore after my foolish naivety with Ingrams (see post below). And by putting the ePub format up with them too the title's also available on any number of other eBookstores albeit not too well-known outside of the USA (mostly - there's about 2 in the UK and a handful in Brazil, India and Thailand as well on the ePub distribution list) so pretty much all internet bases covered :-)

Onwards and Upwards as they say (and I did! In Onwards and Upwards, chapter 4...) :p

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Ding... Ding... Round 3!

OK - so I'm thick and can't read FAQs ><

My distributor for both print and eBooks are a subsidiary company with the biggest book distributors in the world - Ingrams. So they have a number of FAQs on their online POD business procedures including a very impressive one about their distribution partners such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Book Depository and other bookstore luminaries around the world.

Except they neglect to tell you that these are distribution partners for print publications only - there's a different list for eBook ones, some of which are on the print list as well, but NOT Amazon, Barnes & Noble and... You get the picture? So there I was blissfully checking on Amazon every day and wondering why Milele wasn't showing up as an eBook purchase, because I'd been told it'd take between 3 - 8 weeks to get through on the databases.

I did smell a rat but I wasn't asking the right questions. I just had a wee giggle at the irony of my print book getting on Amazon in under 48 hours, but the digital one was taking in excess of 4 weeks... Eventually I pointed this out to my account rep - yesterday in fact, which is why I came back to a gobsmacking time bomb in my inbox last night, with the vital info that in fact Amazon weren't a distribution partner for their eBooks at all and the rosy-hued scales dropped off with a mighty clang.

Boy did I feel a right 'nana!

Anyway, long story short I uploaded everything into the wee small hours and went to bed with it still unpublished because I couldn't get hold of my bank IBAN details until this morning (well actually I could have as the info was there, but by that time my brain couldn't cope with the online banking interface a nano-second longer...). Have just come back out of my little cyber tunnel and it's all loading onto the Amazon mainframe as I type, so the piece of the jigsaw nightmare that is self-publishing is quietly burrowing it's way onto the interweb and should be all systems go within a few hours.

Now all I have to do is flog a few more copies and promote, promote, promote... I feel quite kamikaze so watch this space!