Yesterday was all nicely laid out with the next tasks all pigeonholed for the day…and then I woke up to an email from Amazon asking me for a detailed response to why they should allow me to publish more than the now requisite 2 books per week.
So the entire morning was spent doing this. The historic details were easy, and my reasons behind the request were easy too, but they wanted to know so many other things, like how many items, what they consisted of, etc, etc, etc.
I started to count them and add them to my reply as I went along, but every time I was distracted, I had to start again. In the end I created an extra spreadsheet in my power workbook and listed them all. I listed all the short stories, all the collections, all the bookazines, all the writers’ guides, all the boxed sets, all the novellas, all the novels, all the print publications…totted them up and added that to the email.
I gave it a quick once over, read it out to the poet, and sent it off. By this time midday had come and gone! So after our midday breakfast, when I was back at my desk, I moved everything along – again!
KDP are not only restricting us to 2 brand-new books per week. They’re also limiting us to 10 pre-orders. With me publishing 5 books per week, I’m already up to my limit on the pre-orders. So I moved everything along so the next time I’m publishing books, the pre-order dates have already come and gone.
If they come back and refuse my request, then I have 2 options: 1. Just republish 2 books to KDP each week, or 2. Remove everything from KDP and just tick the Amazon box at D2D. Neither option is ideal, as I’ll pay more in commission if I move everything back to D2D. But until they come back to me, there’s no point worrying as I may be worrying for nothing. Ah well, I needed a bit of a break from the republishing anyway…
For the rest of the day I worked for the editing client. A book I sent revisions for a couple of months ago has come back and I had to check the new file against the old file to see if everything had been done. Mostly, it had. But there were a handful of instances where they hadn’t, and one instance whereby text had disappeared since the last time I saw it.
I hadn’t checked the picture captions last time. I’d only sent a revised text document for the captions as I didn’t have the actual plates pdf. The client sent me the plates file but it looks like she didn’t send the text document to the designer. So I edited the captions again. It was only 8 pages, so no big deal. And once I’d done that I added it to the same email and sent them both back.
By this time I should have been writing the first draft of a short story I was supposed to write the day before, but it had already been pushed along. I was worn out, though. So I moved it to today. With the deadline on Sunday, though, I need to write it today or not bother. I may make it the first job of the day after I’ve set the Cosmos to work overnight in my sleep in the hope of being able to rattle something off fairly quickly today. It has been known to happen, but not usually on command. We shall see.
The only other job today is the new editing job for the editing client. I finished all the formatting on Tuesday and printed it off. It’s currently sitting in my editing folder waiting for me to do the hard copy edit.
I should be able to manage a short story and an edit…unless Amazon want more information from me…
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