Publishing Update: Kindle Preview

tyunglebower ♦ June 12, 2014 ♦ Leave a comment

Last night, I uploaded Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater to the Kindle preview thing they have over at Amazon. I’m happy to report that if the preview is any indication, (and it is of course supposed to be), the Kindle version will look quite tidy and professional.

There are a few minor issues that I may need to address with the manuscript. None of them, left undone, would result in a sloppy e-book, from what I could tell. But tending to them may just give it the extra aesthetic…something. I conceded that for one of the things I may be the only one to notice, but I do notice. So I’ll be pondering that and consulting with some other self-publishers I know in the coming days.

On the whole, though, it looks how I want it to look. Not one for cute fonts and fancy typesetting gimmicks, I just wanted the links to work properly, and there not to be any gaping spaces in the text where they didn’t belong. I also wanted the differentiation between the stories to be clear. All of the above are true, if the preview is to be trusted, and I’m more than a bit excited about that.

Truth be told, I wasn’t aware one could preview how a file would look on Kindle devices until someone mentioned it to me a few days ago. As I had yet to fully open author account over at Amazon, I went and did everything in one sitting in regards to that.

On the subject of opening the account, it began to feel real at that point. Once you start giving your tax information and such to a distributor, it hits you that you’re about to sell something you created to essentially the whole Western World. That is, it will be available to the whole Western World, at any rate. Even if you don’t become rich or famous from your fiction, the act of getting the financial machinery in order for what may happen brings it all home in a way that buying covers, promoting, and even writing the first drafts doesn’t quite match. This experience will only apply to this very first self-published adventure, I’m sure, as by the next time I’ll already have established accounts and tax IDs and the like. But for today, it’s a focusing agent if ever there was one. This is all fun and exciting, and I imagine one day will be rewarding, but it is not a game.

So what remains for me to do, nine days before the official launch? There’s the aforementioned minor issues with the Kindle file to look into. Then I need to do another pass or two over the non-Kindle file I’ll be uploading elsewhere. (No, I’m not going with Amazon exclusively. I don’t want to limit myself.) Which means I’ll have similar business oriented tasks to perform elsewhere soon. I also want to see which places, if any, need me to have an author account so to speak, in case people want to learn more about me and such, when they download from that distributor.

I’ve got keywords and categories to fine tune for classification purposes. Some technical machinery to familiarize myself with. And there are a few more soft-sell places to mention the book’s upcoming launch I’ll probably look into.

As much as any of that, though, is the mental component, which I’ve mentioned before. I mustn’t forget to take some time during each of the busy days remaining to clear my head of anxiety about this project, and to be feel confident in the aspects of it I can control, and prepared for the aspects which I cannot control. And I need to prepare for the sensation of having it out there for that previously mentioned Western Civilization to see.

Quiet reflection on the undertaking each day would not be out of order at this point.

Yet not too much quiet reflection for now; I have a book to launch, on June 21st! I hope all of  my readers who’ve tracked my progress on this blog so far will purchase a copy of  Thank You for Ten when the time comes. I’m asking all of you to do so. Your readership of this blog is appreciated, and I’d like you to enjoy reading my fiction as well.

Yet that’s still nine days off. For now, I am going to examine the Kindle file, and see what I can improve.