SquarePeg Books

We are done with formatting!!!! And with figuring out a price! And with most of the bookcover for the print version.

We are now struggling with the alphabet soup of ISBN, LCCN and a few other things.

I’ve got a block of ISBN’s, and that part is reasonably easy, it’s just hard to wrap my head around it, because the world is round and my brain is now square.

Right now I’m waiting on a comeback on the LCCN. I hate dealing with government submission stuff, mainly because as I’m reading the instructions, it’s very clear they don’t have my entire situation in mind. I’m a self-pubbed author (they got that part). I have a business in which I’m nesting all of my publications under (this part if very wiggly and uncertain how I enter that? Did I do it right? I don’t know? Maybe), and I’m using pseudonyms as authors under that general umbrella of SquarePeg Books. They don’t really have instructions for that part. I submitted my request, and now I’m waiting for them to say “yes, here’s your number, now go away” or “nope, you did it wrong, go back and do it again, correctly this time” but apparently they don’t need to tell you what you did wrong? So I’m gnawing on fingernails at the moment, because of course I have to overthink EVERYTHING until I’m frozen in fear of “what do I do if I screw up? will I be able to try again? will they let me correct my mistakes? will I be doomed forever?”

You know–typical catastrophic thinking. Which may be amplified by my over-consumption of true crime podcasts and that sort of thing.

What have I learned?

1- I overthink everything to the point of catastrophe.

2-I need to build in a greater time cushion prior to publication date because of waiting on other organizations to get me the numbers and things I need.

3-I do not deal with uncertainty, well (see point 1)

4-uploads to Amazon for epub do not work if you are running linux based software, so I have to go through a third party distribution channel to get there. Less money, but it gets me out there, and it looks like I can still run sales of my work on the platforms, I just have to figure it all out. Which is intensely frustrating, but at the same time, I recognize this as a side effect of being a cheapskate, so there we go.

We are now moving on to uploading to IngramSpark for the print version, so we will see how that goes.