This week I began my first foray into publishing on Amazon, I am going to go into more details of actual release dates etc on the Vlog on Friday but today I want to talk about those few tentative clicks, scratching of the head and banging of the head against the wall which I believe I cannot be the first person to have experienced.

First lets start with KDP I went I filled in my details, I spent an age filling in some strange tax form which may mean I have signed my life away to the US then I tried to fill in my bank details, first brick wall.  It was asking for an IBAN number and a Script number I looked on my account and could not see them so called up the building society I bank with and you see that there is the problem ‘building society’! I talked through with the very nice girl on the phone the boxes I could fill in and she informed me that the money (if I ever make any) would not reach me with the information they were asking for, it would reach the clearing bank but not my account so I fired off a message to Amazon.  Several hours later they confirmed their system was not set up for that and I will have to receive any funds by cheque, of course that means that they will probably arrive in time for my funeral given the amounts that have to build up in each currency before they pay.

So I now have the royalty details sorted so on to uploading the files, now the file I uploaded was not the finished manuscript but it is a first draft so allows me to see how it is going to look. First this I learnt was that in future I will avoid long words in my book titles, turns out Disintegration is a difficult word in a title page to get to fit to all formats, I have just about managed it except for android phones, as the owner of an android phone I have now decided books should not be read on one.  Next up filling in all the details of the book itself, I have done this though I am not sure whether I should add more tags, but what should a book of stories about break ups come under I picked Romance as there was not an anti-romance option, I also considered satire or black humour but not sure I am actually funny so that might not be the best choice but I have time to consider that yet.

Next up pricing I went for the 35% so I could charge less as these are short stories and I doubt this will make a hefty book but I have decided to do a paper copy after and give the kindle version free with the print version. I know lots of people recently seem to have been a little down on the KDP programme but I decided to give it a go with this as obviously the hope is to get as many people reading my work as possible then hopefully they might decide to pick up more titles at a later date, the free days will also come in useful when Voices is coming out to tempt readers in but this will also add extra years on to the time a cheque falls through the door from any part of the world.

Then comes the biggest frustration you see you would think you could just fill on one author page and it would link to your book no matter what market but no that would be too simple so first you do the UK one, not too bad, next up .com again no problem then you realise you cannot remember a word or French or German and you never knew Chinese/Japanese to start with. I managed through the French and German pages with the aid of Google translate, I just have to hope that it was not in one of those moods and decided to turn my innocent bio into an insult filled rant.  The Chinese/Japanese page would not even let me log in to attempt to make a page so I gave it up as a bad job maybe if I become famous enough for it to be an issue I will have made enough to get someone to sort it for me.

I have to say overall despite the frustrations of having to repeat actions over and over again I think this pre-release option is a good one for me as it gives me a firm deadline to work to but I shall talk more about that and the actual date in Fridays Vlog.