One Step Forward... by Jana Richards

You know that saying, right? One step forward, and two steps back. That’s exactly how I felt this past week, and it’s not a feeling I enjoy.

I decided to take five of my indie-published books out of their exclusive arrangement with Kindle Unlimited and publish them wide. By wide, I mean I’m making them available at many book retailers and libraries rather than only at Amazon. In March, I uploaded these books to Kobo, and to Draft to Digital, a company that will take my books to Apple, Barnes and Noble, Overdrive and several other bookstores. I congratulated myself on a job well done, and then my husband and I jetted off for a few days in Las Vegas at the end of March. 

And then I came home and discovered the job wasn’t so well done after all. 

I’m not sure what I was doing back in March, but I didn’t realize some of the links I used in the back matter of the ebook versions of these books were broken. I also found that a couple of the QR codes in the print versions didn’t work either.

Ugh.

To add insult to injury, I happened to peruse a proof for a print book I created last fall for “Christmas at Solace Lake.” Except on the inside title page it was called “Christmas at Solace Lake Copy.” Further investigation showed that the top of every other page bore the title of “Christmas at Solace Lake Copy.”

What? When did that happen? And why hadn’t I noticed this months ago? I got the darn print proof copy to check for errors before publishing. I should have seen it! 

Needless to say, I was not impressed with myself. But the only thing I could do now was start over. So, I went back to the source material, corrected all the errors on all six books, double-checked that all the links worked (then double-checked a second time), and uploaded the books to the different retailers. Again. 

It took a fair bit of time, time I could have used elsewhere, like writing my current my work in progress. It was very frustrating, especially since I have plans to get the rights back to some other books and go indie-wide with them, too. I also want to open a store where readers can go to buy my indie books directly from me. 

But all of that is going to take a lot of work. And time. If I’m going to accomplish all my goals, I won’t have time to do jobs twice over. 

There’s no doubt it’s tough being an authorpreneur. I’m a one-woman show: I have to be an administrator, formatter, a marketing expert and a creative writer. This fiasco demonstrated that my administrative skills need some sharpening. 

One thing this set-back has taught me is that going forward I’ll need to be a lot more organized, methodical and careful. From now on, I only want to do things once!

To make me feel better, has anyone else ever made a dumb mistake that they couldn’t believe they made? I really hope I’m not the only one!