I'm really annoyed at myself.
I had a plan for publishing and promoting my book ("Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories" - catchy, I know!), which was to make it live at the start of May, and before that I'd send advance readers copy to my targeted list of awesome people, and hopefully that would result in some reviews and some promotion to try to kickstart sales.
All that changed when the other day I clicked Publish on the eBook instead of scheduling it first.
The issue with this is that Kindle don't (understandably) allow you to distribute your eBooks outside of the Kindle Store and Amazon if you're signed up to their Kindle Select programme - which I am. So while I can still tell people about the book, and give them copies of the sample pages Amazon put on their website, I can't send anyone the full book in electronic format.
I could buy physical copies and post them, but that's an outlay I can't afford right now. So the reality is that I'm not going to be getting the reviews and the buzz that I was hoping for.
It's bittersweet - I'm really annoyed at myself, because it's my mistake, but also I'm really excited to have my book out live - except it isn't fully live, because of me trying to fix my mistake, the eBook is now back in review status and not actually purchasable, while the paperback and hardback copies are (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F2884VMF) so I'm now waiting until the eBook is back fully live too and then I can do my promotion. Effectively I'm doing a "soft launch", which in my experience is when someone logical tries to do marketing - and it doesn't work. But I'm hoping that I'm wrong!
It's still fun. Writing a book is something I've always wanted to do, and it feels great to have done it. It's just not how I was hoping it would go! But that's life for you I guess :)
Anyway - expect to continue to hear from me more book-related stuff!
