This year is going into my sixth year of self-publishing. I haven’t made it to where I want to be, but I feel like I’m finally getting my feet under me. I know what I want out of publishing and am ready to keep moving forward with putting more books out.
In the process of figuring out how I wanted my publishing journey to go, I looked through all of my stuff and restructured everything to make it simpler and more fun, which is the reason I started doing this in the first place. If it’s not fun, then there’s no point to it. After the release of “Visions and Illusions,” I took a few months to finish setting up other retailers because I had finally gone wide, redo the series bible, and outline other books in the series so that I have a better idea of what I’m writing toward.
I had been trying to do social media posts, but I was struggling to come up with ideas and had to take a hiatus to focus on other things. But in that time, I came up with more ideas of what kinds of posts to do. I also decided to start using pictures that I take myself for post backgrounds when possible. I mostly use nature stock pictures anyway, so all I have to do is go outside with my phone and start snapping. That’s led to my own database of, currently, 193 pictures.
Now, I have a confession to make. I self-edited “A Stormy Path” by myself. I decided that I had learned enough about editing to be able to do it myself and save money. I also had the help of ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and the spell check in Google Docs, which is really good at catching typos, by the way. I was also able to edit this book in less time than the last one.
However, after it was released, I still had some fear of what I would find when I read it again. I needed to go through it and highlight what needed to be added to the series bible, but I was procrastinating hard. Finally, I sat down and read and was pleasantly surprised. I only found a few small edits to make when I add the sneak peek of book four.
Now, getting to the reason this post was named “A Stormy Release.” The writing, editing, formatting, and cover design processes were all fairly smooth. Then it got to release day, and as it seems to always happen, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. When I released “Visions and Illusions,” the internet decided to refuse to work, and I had to use my phone’s hotspot to set up all the retailers. This time, the internet was mostly stable, and I set up the retailers without a hitch after midnight on the day of release. I think I only had to use the hotspot a little bit to help speed things up. The next day, the release of “A Stormy Path” was literally and figuratively stormy.
First off, the internet wasn’t working well (probably due to the wild weather that was developing). Then ProWritingAid Everywhere decided to glitch and start using 90 to 100 percent of the CPU, causing the fans to go wild and the computer to be laggy. I struggled to shut my computer down to stop that. Then I found out that KDP posted the wrong price for the paperback. It was supposed to be $9.99, but it was somehow published as $11.20. The dashboard showed my price as correct. I have no idea what happened, but with the help of the support team, it was fixed within a couple of hours, luckily.
Then we get into the literal storminess. I knew it was going to rain, but I didn’t know there would be three rounds of severe thunderstorms and the largest hail I’ve ever seen here. It didn’t hit me until later that I released a book with “stormy” in the name on a stormy day. It definitely wasn’t planned. Here are some pictures of what the weather was like:
But the chaos didn’t end there. After the first hail storm, I was distracted and anxious, which isn’t good when you’re trying to do release tasks. The internet still wasn’t good, so I had to use my phone’s hotspot. I posted on Instagram and forgot the link to the book. I then realized that I had never fully set up the book’s website page. I still needed to set up the Books2Read link and add hardcover links. Then I had to update Link Tree. I finally got the Instagram post fixed, at least I thought so, and posted on Facebook.
That’s when the second severe storm arrived. I was in the middle of hurrying to post on Twitter and realized, after I logged out, that I forgot the book link again. Then I had to wait until the storm calmed down to get back on. Of course, then Twitter was giving me errors logging in, and I had to use an incognito tab. And a last little disaster. I suddenly realized I had written that the previous two books were “not available in hardcover” instead of “now available in hardcover.” I don’t remember if I worked on anything else after that because a third severe storm arrived at night.
When you release a book, just expect that the day will be complete chaos. And next time, I’m picking a release day when the weather is nice.
