Some folks are superstitious, some are sentimental. I’m a little of both. If you read any of my books, you will always see I end on an even numbered chapter. It’s not superstition, just a personal quirk.
I also like to occasionally publish on relevant days- like Christmas, my birthday, and my latest attempt was 4 July. Good intentions never seem to work, especially when you are working with other companies in this venture. There are also the time zone issues- where are the company servers?
After deciding that I wanted to launch Space Junk on the 4th, I set in motion everything I needed to do in order to make that possible. I loaded everything into my accounts on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I knew Smashwords was an immediate upload and would be done as soon as I hit the publish button and it ran through the “meat grinder.” But I didn’t take into consideration that SW is a west coat company. I stayed up well past midnight (EST) to get all my books with a 4 July publication date. Yeah, right! I guess I should’ve stuck to my other plan: getting up about 4 a.m. to do the deed on the 4th.
Each company has different time lags to publish your book. If you upload at Amazon KDP or BN, your title may take 12-24 hours to go live. CreateSpace is supposed to be instant upon approving your proof copy (digital or hard copy) But the paper copy showed up a day later. And SW is live ASAP, so I knew I needed to wait. Everything was a crap-shoot, and I rolled a 7.
The result of this whole well-thought plan: I ended up with having all versions (except BN) with a 3 July publication date. Was I mad? Yup. Email to the companies didn’t produce anything, and I didn’t have the time to be able to unpublish and fix everything and have it come out right. Lesson learned.
My next book, The Hall, I’m aiming for a release on Halloween. Therein lies another problem. If I want to release the book on 31 Oct, and I actually might be holding a signing event, then I need some copies beforehand to have available. Now I’m asking myself how can I pull that one off? Maybe I’ll just have to suck up the fact that maybe the print version will come out a little earlier so I can get copies. It’s always something!
[A version of this article first appeared on Kathy Rowe’s blog on July 6, 2012. It is reproduced here with the author’s consent.]
I’m so glad I don’t have that little quirk because it seems to be a nerve racking thing. I really enjoy the article and I hope your Halloween release goes as desired.
Thanks, toes crossed for that one!
I’m just relieved when mine actually publish! lol
Yeah!!
I’ll be grateful this time around to get the e-book and paperback out on more or less the same day. Usually I concentrate on the e-book and then have to work myself up for the CreateSpace formatting, lol.
Good luck with your Halloween launch, Kathy!
I end up formatting both at the same time, so getting them out together isn’t too difficult. The only thing that might have slowed me up on the print copy was my artist, but she was great and delivered Dar right on time so he could grace the back cover.
Good luck on your book!
Great post, Kathy. An interesting concept, I guess it would be cool to have a special date for publication. Mine was published on Createspace on April 1, not sure if that was such a good idea. Some kind of April fools joke.
Good luck on Halloween!
Well, for you, that date may be a good one. For our family, we don’t talk about 1 April- a very bad event happened on that day, so we avoid even thinking about it.
But, if you write a sequel or even another book, 1 year apart release dates give your readers something to look forward to.
Good luck and happy writing!
Even numbered chapter? Er, mine are whatever they are. I can’t predict it.
Yes, Whiskey, I’m weird. You should know me well enough by now to know that!