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, including a few fun book side projects that you will find out about soon.
In the process of figuring out how I wanted my own publishing journey to go, I looked through all of my stuff and restructured everything to make it more simple and 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 had a few months of finishing setting up other retailers because I had finally gone wide, redoing the series bible, and outlining 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 backgrounds for the posts. I mostly use nature 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. Plenty to choose from and not have to always worry about using stock photos.
Now, I have a confession to make. I self-edited “A Stormy Path” entirely by myself. Yes, you read that right. 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 about 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 update the book with 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. 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 somehow published as $11.20. The dashboard showed my price as correct. I have no idea what happened, but I got it fixed within a couple of hours, luckily.
Then we get into the literal stormyness. 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 storm with all the hail, 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 that I forgot the link again after I logged out. Then I had to wait until the storm calmed down to get back in. Of course, then Twitter was giving me errors logging in, and I had to use an incognito tab to finally get in. 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.