Barely breaking even...

Sunday afternoon the email came from my editors (my parents) that Letalis Vindicta was all checked and ready to publish. I had been through the word doc numerous times myself; however my dyslexia means that I miss very basic errors, so was so grateful for their expert eye giving it the final once over.

As I mentioned before, sadly no agent was interested in my series yet and so I am having to take the daunting path of self-publishing.

Not perturbed I started exploring the self-publish route and got sucked in by the many blog of success stories. After a lot of researching back in December I settled on createspace, it seemed to be a low cost option and if I did the artwork and editing myself could be done with no costs.

Monday morning I was very motivated as I started to do the last read through and tidy up, making sure page breaks were in the right places and by the end of the day it was all formatted.

Tuesday morning I was all set to upload to createspace and create my book. As the day progressed I was getting more excited.

The first upload drew my attention to the fact my 368 page book need a trim size of 8.5 x11. Inches. I uploaded it and it look lovely on the screen, I put in my estimated price $9.99 (£6.72) to see what roughly my royalty might be and was shock to see that in the UK I would be in the negative and USA I would make just $0.73. I didn't set out on this project to make my fortune, however I did hope I wouldn't have to give my book away at a loss.

So I went back to see if reducing the font size would help. The other option would be to raise the price, however through my own experience of buy books off amazon, I know like me, people are willing to take a gamble on a book if it below £8, but above that they won't be as quick to click and buy. So I am realistic and know there is not much movement on price.

Reducing the font size from 12 to 10 I feared the words would be difficult to read, so I decided to print out a page of my book to see how it looked. That is when it hit me 8.5 x 11 is A4, my book was going to be huge. At this point my excitement had all but disappeared as it was painfully clear that my book had too many words to continue down this route and be plausible. Clearly the success stories I had read about, were people who were publishing book half the size of mine. Letalis Vindicta is a long book because it tracks Darla's journey from childhood into adulthood. It introduces the main character that continues through future books, to cut it into two smaller book wasn't an option, I was devastated.

However I decided I needed to finish the process off, even if I just print one copy to put on my shelf. I uploaded the A5 version to createspace the book now was a whopping 600 pages and just to break even would be priced at £11. I went to bed close to tears.

When I had the rejection letters from the agents I picked myself up with 'there is always the self-publishing route'. I had spent the past three months with my parents as editors getting this book to this stage and to fall at the last hurdle was gutting. It wasn't just I was disappointed; I also felt guilty that I had wasted my parents time as well as my own. I didn't sleep well Tuesday night. 3 am as I lay in those hours that all problems seem to be ten times worse than they ever appear at 7am; the words my husband had said in his attempt to comfort me sank home. "What about eBook’s?"

I woke Wednesday morning with a new drive. I had two options, my first to just give up and leave my book on my hard drive. Or option two accept my book wouldn't make it to print unless a publisher took me on and explore the eBook market. I took the latter and started to do some research.

Two pints of tea later I was setting up an Amazon account and was going through the process of getting to the stage of creating an eBook. The helpful YouTube video that said it could be done in 4 minutes was slightly unrealistic, however the process was very straight forward and by Lunchtime I had a eBook version of Letalis Vindicta ready to launch. I hovered over the button but didn't click. Although I had been waiting for this day for near on 6 months I didn't feel ready. Less than 6 hours ago I had started down this eBook route and I felt I needed to put a few thing in place before I launched.

For one I wanted to write this blog, set the website up so it was ready to direct my potential buyer to Amazon. I need to share my website on Facebook and have a little build up to the big launch. But most of all I need that last pinch of reassurance that I was ready. That could come from only one person, my husband. He is back tonight and has a week off for Easter, so hopeful he will have time to check stuff over so I can launch next week sometime.