Well, not quite yet – but as of today, Indiot (Isabella Maxwell’s Escapades Book 2)
You see, Amazon lets you upload a book for up to 90 days before the release, but if you miss the date, or don’t upload the final draft 10 days prior, you will be banned from pre-releasing anything else for a whole year. Not only that, they want you to upload a “final draft for review”. You can read the full details in Kindle Preorder guide. They do say that the “final draft” may still need to undergo copy-editing, but it’s not clear what they would be checking or how raw of a draft it could be. At the same time, I see books on Kindle all the time that are slotted for release in six or more months – how is that possible?
Another reason I was not ready to upload was that I just could not figure out how to finish the draft cover. To remind you, this is what the mock-up looked like:
The main issue I had with the mock-up was the title, as usual. I liked the idea of the diamonds, because a certain diamond necklace is featured in the plot, but when I started working on the final version, the diamonds were competing with all the other embroidery and textures. So I set it aside. For about three months, until I finally had a breakthrough today. It’s a diamond necklace, duh!
Once I had the new design figured out, the adrenaline went through the roof – suddenly I was decisive and confident. In a matter of a couple of hours, I registered the ISBN, had the draft text formatted, and the cover and manuscript uploaded to KDP. I spent a few nail-biting hours worrying that KDP would come back with “You have a bazillion spelling mistakes” until I saw that Indiot was available on Kindle. It took another couple of hours for my Author page to be updated, and then an hour-long exhausted nap, as I collapsed in a wake of a realisation so enormous, I still have to pinch myself.
I’m an author of a series.
Okay, so it’s short, at two installments, but it finally gives me the marketing leverage I’ve craved for so long. I’ve already made Shizzle, Inc free on Kobo, so if you have a moment, could you please help me make it perma-free by telling Amazon to match the price? The “tell us about a lower price” link is under Shizzle, Inc
I even made a new banner for the blog, to finally make it look like a proper author page – what do you think? The next thing on my list is a similar banner for Twitter. I can almost taste the new marketing, starting with a whole wave of the new quotes. More ads, too – and if you’ve read Shizzle, Inc but have not yet posted the review on Amazon, could you pretty-please do that? I’m at 37 reviews at the moment, but supposedly I have to be at 60 to get the attention of BookBub. I have some other crazy new ideas, which I will hatch in a separate post.
And finally, if you are waiting on the beta-version to read, I’m still tinkering with it 🙂 But I will definitely email it on 1 May – thank you in advance for so generously donating your time!
This is all. One hell of a day, and the one thought that keeps going through my mind is – why was I so afraid to list it for pre-order in the first place? It was not hard.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Ana Spoke, author 