SquarePeg Books

The last insecure writers’ blog hop of the year.

Some folks are writing about cliffhangers in their work and how they feel about them at the end of a book.

Right now I’m struggling to just get things set up to publish. I’m not sure what I expected after I set up my LLC and all that–I didn’t think it was going to be a snap of the fingers to self publish, but I did think I’d done enough research to not get caught on the wrong foot at every step.

Apparently not.

So, then we decided “Fuck it. Just do the thing. Figure it out as you go.”

That method is slow as hell, too. More crap just keeps coming up–did you read the fine print for this program/service? Did you set up your payment details? Can you afford Adobe Indesign to format the PDF yourself? Did you think about your SEO terms, BISAC terms? Oh, wow, Atticus only accepts .docx to format to epub. Do you have an LCCN? Yes, you’ve got an ISBN, but do you have the other ISBN and the SKU code, which you have to pay extra for, per instance? Can I use Scribus to format a book pdf? Should I format epub through D2D then use the epub on Ingram Spark? How many different videos have you watched about formatting your MS for this platform–because clearly you missed this one with a tiny bit of crucial detail that you absolutely must do, or everything is hosed, and you’ll need to start all over again.

Who knew? Well, you, dear reader, may have, but again, I was taken by surprise.

I suppose there isn’t a single right answer, but there sure does seem to be a lot of wrong ones to do just one thing.

Someday I’ll post a finalized list of what I had to do, in order to epub, and another list for print. That would be worth a look or two. It might help someone. Or it might confuse the hell out of them.

Will Joe ever get off their ass and publish a first book? In any form? Will Katty return from sabbatical and finish her damn fantasy novel series (several-just pick one, dammit)? Who the hell is Spark? Is Lynne really someone we want to acknowledge? Will we ever get these deep plot questions answered?!?!?!?

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see what other writers are thinking about!