Friday 15 August 2025: Still publishing…

Phew! What a busy day I had yesterday. And I thought it would all be so quick and simple too. Serves me right for being such a perfectionist, I suppose. That or the OCD just won’t let the slightest thing go.

So…the plan was to publish Ten Very Short Stories: Wordsworth Flash Fiction 1 – 10 and then get on with everything else I have to get on with. August was romping on and I’d hardly done anything I’d planned to.

But…before I could publish the new collection, I also wanted to make sure that the actual short stories being collected were also as up to date as they can be. 

I wanted them to have my latest note about any kind of AI use being strictly forbidden. I wanted to change the publisher from Baggins Bottom Books to Baggy Bottom Books. I wanted them all to have covers on them that I’d created in Affinity and not on Canva. I wanted the Also by… list to be current as of now rather than what it was in 2022, when they were all first published. And I wanted to change the prices from £/$1.49 to £/$1.99 on all of them.

There are ten of these stories I wanted to updated (the clue being in the title of the collection) and I it was quicker to create a front matter and an end matter than could just be copied and pasted into them all. And it took me All Day. But when I went to upload them to Google Play Books, Google Play Books wasn’t having any of it. I just couldn’t upload any files. Epub files or cover files.

I logged a report for the first 2 books not letting me upload any files, and the response I got was along the lines of ‘there are no files uploaded for these books, please upload the files’. 

Um…(is it me?)

So I replied saying that the reason there were no files uploaded was because it wouldn’t let me upload any. 

The techie replied again with a list of things to try, and suggesting I should contact an expert if there was anything I didn’t understand…

Is that a red rag or what? I had 34 books up and live on Google Play Books and I have 80 books in total on Draft2Digital, although, granted, they’re not likely to know that.

And anyway, aren’t they supposed to be the experts? Wasn’t that why I was contacting them>

I patiently went through everything they suggested and even downloaded an epub checker that looks for faults and that requires the latest Java to work as well, just so I could, you know, say that yes I had done all of the things an expert would, but still my files weren’t uploading. I even tried again this morning (hence today’s post being a bit later than usual).

The techie sent me another message asking me to upload the files (!!?) and wait 24 hours before contacting them again. So I did, and they uploaded straight away. I’d done nothing different, and I’d even tried uploading the original files that didn’t upload in the first place.

I seriously believe that someone was telling me porkie pies, that there was a bug, that they didn’t know about it until someone experienced advised them of it, and that they fixed. 

So I got the first 2 uploaded and then went back to the collection to knock that into shape and get it published on D2D. I only had to quickly update the Scrivener file, export it as a .docx, and give it a quick proofread with a couple of minor tweaks. And boom! The next collection will be published on Monday. 

Now I have to go back to Google Play Books and get the other 8 stories published on there before I try to publish the collection. 

And that, my friends, is what I’ll be doing today.

Have a fab weekend. We have 2 gigs back to back, and grand-doggy #1 goes home today.