I Am My Own Co-author

I am full of (quite excellent) stollen, so I'm just going to ramble on some more about independent publishing.

If you do any research, you'll find out about the big stuff. Do you go exclusive to Amazon? How do you get an audiobook made? Why is buying an ISBN so expensive in the US? (They're free in Canada, dammit!) Where do you find someone to make a cover?

All that stuff is discussed all over the place, with the exception of the ISBN price. (There's only one place to buy ISBNs in the US, and you are paying heaps of money for literally a number in their database. I feel like this is an anti-trust lawsuit that is long overdue. Why, yes, I do come up with ridiculous grudges, why do you ask?)

But what nobody really talks about is how much little stupid stuff there is. Things like

• To upload a book to Barnes & Noble, you can't use the Chrome browser. It doesn't tell you that, but it will silently fail on the upload step and you'll be left wondering why the button to move to the next page is never activated. (It works just fine in Firefox.)
  
  
• Books2Read produces a handy universal link -- you can just advertise with one link, and Amazon readers will be redirected to the book at Amazon, Kobo readers will go to the correct Kobo page, etc. It's handy, and it's very easy to use. You just tell it to scan for the links, and it will go out and find the links for the book at all the different distributors. But for some reason, it's not getting the Amazon link, even though that's the first place the novella went live. Since 90% of my sales come from Amazon, I can't really use the universal link until that works.

And then there's this little glitch:

These co-authors are often mistaken for each other.

In the grand scheme of things, this is minor and sort of funny, but I did spend some time clicking around, trying to figure out why it thinks there are two of me. I'm guessing this will magically fix itself sometime soon, but if not, I'll have to send mail to support and try to explain that I am only one person.

It's the little things...

Gratuitous Dog Picture

I'm enjoying finding pictures of my dogs in nice weather. We'll get there again!