It’s amazing how much you can learn when you’re self-publishing. I have heard other self-published authors describe the process, but I don’t think you actually know what it feels like until you experience it on your own.
The past few weeks have been a lot of hard work, late nights, and testing of my patience. This is coming from someone who has worked in the graphic design field for many years.
I have been doing everything on my own, and right now the only thing that has been easy for me was the cover design, and even that took a while to even decide on.
Laying out the book for print wasn’t hard, as I’ve done it many times before working on magazines, and other booklets. My issue with that was rushing through it, trying to get my hands on a printed proof. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I did because it was AMAZING to have it in my hands, but next time, I will definitely take my time. There were a lot of little details that I missed and they became evident as I quickly looked through the book for layout and formatting issues. Tonight, as I was so confident in my book being done, I hit the “publish” button and now that it’s in review, I noticed a spelling error on the dedications page. I came very close to just shutting everything down, taking a shower, and going to bed. I was just done. But I told myself, “You’re learning. This is going to happen. On the second book, you will know better.”
Without a doubt, the absolute BIGGEST HEADACHE of it all has been with the digital book. As much as I tried to format the book and make it look nice, it doesn’t really matter because when you export to epub (reflowable text) from InDesign, a lot changes, and then when you upload it to Amazon, things change some more. The only way to not have the changes occur is to export without the reflowable text and that’s not something I wanted to take away from my readers. As much as I hate it, I just have to live with the fact that if you want the fancy options with today’s e-readers, you’re a bit limited on your formatting. One thing I can call a victory was that I had emojis in my story as there are texts, and I didn’t know how that would transpose to the digital book, as I was losing the font in translation. I was able to figure out a trick I had used in designing other materials and it worked perfectly. Not sure what I would have done, had I not.
Through this whole ordeal, the one thing I dreaded the most was taking a photo. I am not a photo person. I LOVE to take photos, I loathe being in them. I took almost twenty selfies and out of all of them, I somewhat liked two. I finally had to just give in and pick one and just go with it. Hopefully, I can lose some weight and be able to take another in the future. I know it sounds silly, but my self-esteem has always made me feel this way about myself. Rarely will you ever see a selfie of me without anyone else in the photo with me.
This has been frustrating, tiresome, but yet, slightly rewarding. I’m very close to officially publishing my first novel ever and it all still seems a little surreal to me. Hopefully, I can look back at this one day and laugh at how much I struggled with my first book. Hopefully.