In Update 3 of this self-publishing adventure, it’s time to tell you whether I made my own first deadline. February 14th was the day I would switch from one housesitting gig to another and I wanted the first draft finished by then.  Well, in the wee hours of February 13th, I plowed through the ending to the novella.  Hooray!

It would take me a couple days to actually read that part and figure out if it was worth a damn, though. The move to the new apartment, plus the responsibilities of walking a strong and an often-spooked golden retriever puppy in Manhattan were a lot for me to handle physically.  I was pretty much useless aside from my dootie-scooping duties for a while.

As a result, it took longer than I hoped to do content editing before handing things over to Rebecca Sutton for other types of editing. That might make my ultimate release deadline next week really tough.

In other news, I am enjoying the hell out of my crash pad/office this week.  (See main photo.) It puts every cubicle to which I’ve ever been subjected to sad, shameful shame . . . mostly because I can adjust the heat to a reasonable room temperature.

If you’re thinking of doing your own publishing, the following fine details about my progress may interest you.

1. ISBN Purchase: Fuck that. I was considering buying one, but then saw that I would need a new one for each format (e.g., ebook, hardcover, paperback,) and knowing the ISBN for an ebook probably wouldn’t help a reader do anything. It seems to be mainly useless and I am broke, so I’m skipping that step.
2. Grammarly Premium Subscription being seriously contemplated. Since I can’t afford a premium “I-do-this-for-a-living” editor person, and my human editor is also currently under the weather, I’ll probably pony up the $30 for a month’s worth. So far, I’ve just used the free version of Grammarly, and it’s been helpful. The free version doesn’t tell you all those finicky little fuck-ups, though. Then again, $30 is like 86 book sales. And, it would be the only part of the process I’ve had to spend money on so far. UGH.
3. Ebook Cover: do it myself? I know for a fact the quality of cover art directly relates to sales numbers. This was one of the things I considered paying for while I winced and groaned in my soul. Then, I thought, “well I should at least try to create a cover and see how shit it turns out.” I finished it today, and . . . hey, I’ve seen a Lot Worse on best-sellers! So, I’m going with the one I made; it looks good enough not to deter potential readers, and that’s good enough for now.
4. Presales Plans: still a go so far. Kindle’s presales rules were previously a lot harder to work with: you needed your perfected manuscript uploaded at least 10 days before your book was released for reading. That would have meant it would be damn near impossible to both do presales and release this month. However, now it’s only 72 hours or 3 days you need to have the polished copy uploaded to Amazon’s KDP. I’m hoping to start presales this week and release February 27th.  Which in turn means I need to have my shit completely together by Thursday, February 23rd. That’s tight. That’s really tight. I’m gonna aim for it nonetheless.

Hopefully, in my next post, I’ll have links for you to check out the presale! Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is a puppy I have to put to bed.

(Like, actually “put to bed”. I’m not killing the dog, FFS. Why would you think that?)