48 hours in the life of a published author
Published author! How do you like them apples?
Published author! How do you like them apples?
Well it sure has been a strange and mangled last 48 hours in the life of this, newly published, and very proud of himself, author. Sunday was a frustrating do I/don’t I internal conversation with the devils on my shoulders as I tried to conjure up a suitable front cover and my son gave the above his nod of approval to the above choice over some other rather lame examples and that was good enough for me. Sunday night into Monday morning I published this via Kindle KDP before realising I had made some fairly silly rudimentary errors and together with the front cover just not “looking right”, I stressed my way through some fitful sleep until a grizzled and damp Monday morning where I essentially deleted my approved book and started again. Then I changed large swathes of the manuscript, improved the cover picture and re-submitted, was approved in minutes before promptly deleting once more and correcting yet more unnecessary mistakes.
If I had any hair to lose, I would surely have done so.
By the early evening of Monday I was finally satisfied, and in more ways than three, and the above book, something I am rather proud of, is available via the Kindle store and should you have the “Unlimited” option, you can read the entire 104 page opus to 27 days from the recent World Cup in Qatar for free.
As pointed out by David Perlmutter (and thanks for your help once again), the layout and parameters and editing programme for turning the Kindle edition into a book is a finickity beast at best, a frustrating and unwieldy bastard at worst. Or perhaps it’s just me.
Anyway, the plan was to use this book as a dry, trial and test run ahead of publishing my behemoth book on the past two seasons in the fortunes of my beloved Liverpool Football Club and to that end, I’ve succeeded as well as taking the lead away from non-existent publishers knocking on my non-existent door. The Liverpool book is really shaping up and worryingly, I really, really like it. Beauty is in the magical eye of the beholder and I worry I like it too much. I wish I could be objective about it but I lack objectivity in this regard as I do the patience needed with Amazon’s paperback book publishing criteria and all of their pretty little lines of coloured doom.
So a wee toot of my own horn and blowing of one’s trumpet.
Another “happy accident”. Another following of one’s heart instead of my dopey head. Another tooting of my own horn.
Toot!
Thanks for reading. Apart from obsessing over a manuscript (and what a strange sentence that is to say inside my own head), here are three of my most recently published articles away from my current obsessional distraction:
Salah and Jota cut down Forest
Liverpool 3 Nottingham Forest 2, 22nd April 2023.medium.com
“JoJo Rabbit” (2019)
Highly recommended satirical comedy.medium.com
Beautiful Gnosall in the Spring sunshine
“These are a few of my favourite things”.medium.com