The Real Work

Well, huzzah and hooray for me, I’ve finally managed to put my nearly 500 hundred page first novel up in the Kindle Store. Any new authors out there who are like me and thought of this as the finish line, well, as I have found out this week, we were dead wrong. In the last week since I have uploaded my book, after sharing a bottle of champagne with my wife at 3 a.m., I have put in every hour of free time either in promoting it, or reposting it.

Let me explain, see, the first thing newbies like me will probably notice when you do your first obsessive check on the way the novel looks after uploading, is that somewhere, something went wrong. How and why it went wrong is what you’ll get to spend the next two days going over. If you’re like me you probably looked at it around ten times before actually uploading it in the previewer that the Kindle Store offers free of charge (you really have to admire their business sense). After all of that looking, where everything appeared normal, you most likely uploaded it... and then found out that it looked very different in real form.

For me, it was the tabs. Yep, that natural motion you learned in eighth grade typing and that you’ve continued throughout your entire amateur writing career is the very thing that has led to your book looking like a fifth grader formatted it. See, apparently the Kindle engine plays merry hell with tab and indents. It makes the code go haywire and you end up with a very odd looking book.

The first thing you notice is that the 0.5” format in Word Tab is WAAAAAY too much for the small screen Kindle format. Reading a few of the blogs and message boards that never crossed my mind to search before publishing (oh, I read them for content, page number, header, and other tips, just didn’t think of indentation) I found out that what Kindle readers like best is a 0.2” indent. The way that you accomplish this is fun to figure out as well. First, (depending on your version of word) you go to Page Layout, Paragraph format tab. Once there, you go to the Indentation section, find the Special drop down box, click First Line, and then finally, go to the By drop down box and set your indent. Got it? Because it took me a while to find.

After that, what I had to do because I could not figure out how to apply it to the entire document in one sweeping move, I had to go to the beginning of every paragraph and press Backspace. This would then automatically make every paragraph begin at the preferred 0.2” indent without a tab space being involved. After spending two days going through the entire document, I re-uploaded it. Side note: this is another awesome and well thought out move by the Kindle Store, while you are fiddling with and re-uploading the newly formatted copy of your book, the first one remains active and downloadable until the new one is approved.

So, that done, I was able to start the real fun. Want to guess what it is? I and my wife have been slowly working our way through the Amazon Top Reviewers list reading profiles and checking for the following criteria: do they accept Kindle Book review requests? Do they have an email address? Does the genre they review match mine? Are they currently accepting review requests? After making a list so far of fifty reviewers and checking over three hundred profiles, I sent out emails to over forty. So far, three people have responded and one has been open to reading and reviewing the book. The end goal is to send out three hundred email requests, offering the book for free and getting hopefully over ten positive reviews.

Everyone with me so far? That means after spending hours and hours searching, emailing, and asking, I’ll get one in thirty people to actually review the book I’m offering for free. And this is the norm. It makes sense when you think about it. These people are being asked non-stop to read and review every single fiction book being pumped out week after week by the people like me who want to try and make a living off the crazy things that are dreamed up inside my head. In addition to all of this, there’s blogging, social networking, and marketing.

In short, all of the things that socially introverted dreamers try to avoid and… so what? This is what I want to do for the rest of my life so in addition to continuing to write the stories that play out in my head (I’m about two weeks away from finishing the first draft of my second one) I need to force myself to do all of the tedious marketing and social promotion that goes along with making an Ebook successful. I have the encouragement of thinking that I happened to write a pretty damned great first novel that I’m very proud of but that doesn’t mean anything unless I get people to read it. I’m hoping that soon the reviews will start to come in and that people start finding the book on their own. But, just as it was my job to bring the story into the world, it’s also my job to make sure that it shines through enough to catch peoples eye in the massive slush pile that is the Amazon Kindle store.

I feel I would be remiss at this point if I did not share the link for my book here:  http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfound-ebook/dp/B00F1TCTW2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1379268456&sr=1-1&keywords=the+unfound