My First Book is Published (And I’m at My Wit’s End)

Sorry I Stole Your Truck is here! Check it out at:

Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Kobo | Other Stores

Now that’s over with, let’s go over the process. I started on November 21. I’m writing this on December 2, so yes, there was a little procrastinating in there, but when you read on, you won’t blame me.

If you’re self-publishing for the first time, it’s an absolute pain in the rear end. I am not a patient person, and I hate technology, so maybe that’s a factor here. Since nobody is reading this blog right now, explaining some of the problems I ran into probably won’t help anyone, but you never know.

I like written instructions. The one really good use I’ve found for ChatGPT is that it can produce written instructions for just about anything—but with a catch. (See what I did there with the emdash?) The catch is that it almost always pulls outdated information from the web and insists that it’s right. Do I keep using it anyway? Like the fool I am, yes.

For reference, I’d rather have my teeth pulled than do anything on a phone, so everything below has been done on a desktop.

Kindle Direct Publishing

I’ve had a KDP account for a while, so it was already partially set up. I had to update bank and tax info and all that. The American tax info can get a little tricky if you’re a Canadian, because they use different words for things (and numbers are really not my thing). All in all, everything was pretty straightforward.

Uploading the book was fairly simple, except that I used their paperback formatting guidelines to format the book, which seemed to upload just fine. However, you’re supposed to use the much vaguer ebook formatting guidelines, found here. More on this below.

Kobo

So, Kobo. Let’s talk about Kobo. What should have been a fifteen-minute task turned into a three-hour ordeal that had me ready to punch myself in the face. For the record, I love Kobo. My e-reader is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made, and I adore it. The following is meant to help others who may run into the same problems as a first-timer, and in no way is it a criticism of Kobo, because I love Kobo.

The first problem I ran into with Kobo was their formatting guidelines. This was where I learned that you don’t need to format it in the same way as a paperback novel. E-readers can display different fonts, so the manuscript itself doesn’t have to be as polished.

Unfortunately, since I’d followed KDP’s paperback guidelines (my manuscript was looking pretty fly), I had to go back and change the margins and font. At this point, I was having ChatGPT walk me through the instructions, for better or worse (paraphrased):

Me: Ugh, I really LIKED it with the Georgia font. But it wants boring old Times New Roman.
ChatGPT: Good news: you do NOT have to use Times New Roman. Georgia is 100% acceptable and safe for Kobo, Apple, Google, and D2D.
Me: No they said “Please use one of the following fonts: Times New Roman, Arial, or Courier New.”
ChatGPT: Good news: You can still use Georgia for your actual text styling.
Me: …moving on. (Guys, don’t listen to an AI that is WRONG. I don’t know why I keep asking it for instructions, but here we are.)

A three-hour Kobo Writing Life ordeal, shortened:

I had to reformat the manuscript, which was quick and easy.
Once I had the new one uploaded, the drop caps looked like garbage, so I went back and removed those, too.
I SAVED MY DRAFT somewhere in here (important for later).
I then tried to re-upload the file with drop caps removed, but it wouldn’t replace the file.
I tried going out of the creator and back in, but when I clicked out of the creator, the draft I saved wasn’t there.

So I started a new draft.
The new draft threw me an error: 1 OPF file failures 1 instance(s) similar to [title] tag is empty. GIRL. KOBO. MY GUY. WHAT IS UP?
I then had to figure out how to add a title tag in Microsoft Word 2016, with ChatGPT giving me instructions for whatever the new Word version is, because it does that. (Spoiler: it’s under File > Info > and under Properties. You can click and edit the title and author there, as well as click Properties itself. It does not look clickable.)
Drum roll…it threw the error again.
(I throw my hands in the air because WHAT. THE EFF.)
I tried to re-save the file and re-upload it three times.
It didn’t work, so I clicked out of the creator. I was about to drop kick it into next week at this point, but lo and behold, the draft I saved earlier magically appeared.
I tried to re-upload the new file, but it didn’t replace the file. I solved this by clicking in and out several times and changing the file name until it finally re-uploaded.

I finally clicked Publish, and…nothing really happened, so I wasn’t sure if it actually worked. ChatGPT discouraged me from rage-clicking it several times.

Goodreads (Claiming Book and Creating Author Profile)

After a few days on Amazon, my book showed up on Goodreads. This was very exciting for me. Claiming it was easy. All I had to do was verify by typing in the email address I used for my KDP and Goodreads accounts. Easy peasy. No complaints.

Amazon, Round 2

The morning after my Kobo ordeal, I woke up realizing that my Amazon price was in USD and my Kobo price was in CAD. Canadian problems, y’all. Math is also not my strong suit. Unwilling to touch Kobo again, I elect to change the Amazon price to the equivalent of $5.00 CDN. Conclusion: easy.

Draft2Digital

Having not learned my lesson, I asked ChatGPT to walk me through setting this up as well. It actually went fairly well, with the interface being pretty user-friendly. The biggest problem came with bank information and the Tax Interview.

One of the bank columns asks for an IBAN. What’s an IBAN? It’s an international bank account number. Canada doesn’t have these, so that field stays blank for Canadians.

I ran into trouble with the SWIFT/BIC, which I also had never heard of before. What’s a SWIFT/BIC? It’s an identifying number for the bank you use. Not a number found on your cheque. Fun fact: some virtual banks don’t have them. Since it’s a required field regardless of whether I selected payment by wire transfer or e-transfer, I couldn’t connect my bank.

And here we got sidetracked again! Since I couldn’t connect my bank, ChatGPT suggested I create a PayPal account and go through there. Since I’d done that before and deleted my account years ago, it sounded like a good solution.

Linking my bank to PayPal didn’t work, because what did at this point? Good news, since I’m making $0 anyway, this didn’t really matter in the moment and is a problem for Future Me. I enter the PayPal email in Draft2Digital, and we move on.

I moved into the Tax Interview. I found it a bit difficult because the Americans use different terminology for some of the same things, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. Luckily, I have ChatGPT to give me all the wrong answers.

What is a Tax Identification Number (TIN)? It’s your SIN number for Canadians. That’s it. So you plug your SIN in here so that they don’t withhold 30% of your earnings under some treaty.

After this, Draft2Digital asks me to log in. I was already logged in. I logged back in and was presented with the tax interview again. There were a few foul words at this point, but I just hit submit again, and thankfully we moved on.

Uploading the book went very smoothly, thanks to my working out all the manuscript kinks with Kobo. One thing ChatGPT had previously told me was that a) uploading to Google Books was a pain in the rear, and b) I could do it via Draft2Digital. I can confirm that point b) is false, and point a) has scared me off bothering.

What’s Next?

ChatGPT advised that I should maximize my cash flow (currently zero) by expanding into paperbacks and audiobooks. I can’t tell you how much I don’t want to do that at the moment, so I plan to revisit those options in six months. Also, I take everything it says with a grain of salt (do not get marketing advice from an AI, folks.)

I plan to publish four novels in total to start with. The first three are a part of The Town of Hellcat Series, and the fourth takes place in the same fictional area, but with much more serious content. This book will form a bridge into my next series, which is firmly in romantic women’s fiction territory.

In the short term, I have to actually finish the third book in the series. Since I no longer have to be as detailed with formatting, the editing and formatting process should go fairly quickly. Tentatively, my plan is to have number two out by Dec 21 and number three by Jan 21 and so forth. I may bump that back, because I have some other projects on my plate.

Book one, though: done.

Check out a few details about my other books on the My Books page!