Self-Publishing, Part 3

It’s Thursday, September 4, and yes, that’s me with a copy of my book in my hand. I received the author copy of my paperback from Amazon yesterday. This is an entirely new experience for me. For the first time ever, I’m holding a book I wrote in my hands. It was difficult for me to put it down for a while.

Amazon did a terrible job shipping it; they put it in with another order and some pages got wrinkled and bent. It looks as though it’s been in a college student’s backpack (without the benefit of anyone’s annotations, unfortunately). No worries, the actual job of printing it is excellent. I suspect when you’re paying nothing but the cost of printing the book (not even for shipping, thanks to Amazon Prime) they have little concern for how the proof gets to you.

In the meantime, most of the work to put The Immortal Remains out into the world is on track. But some weird things are happening. As far as I can tell right now, most of my publication efforts are going fine. Exceptions are Barnes and Noble and Google (details below).

I also ran into a few unexpected issues with Apple, but it turned out that somehow I’d created two iTunes Connect accounts, and everything was set up happily under the account I didn’t see!

I set up my Draft2Digital account (print-on-demand outside of Amazon, libraries and other small storefronts) today and have ebook and print set up there, just waiting for bank and tax confirmations. I’m doing all the other digital publishing on my own to avoid D2D’s 10% charge on royalties

Barnes and Noble is just being weird, as so many places are with security options these days. I received the tiny little deposit they use to confirm my bank account, but so far my efforts to get back into my B&N Press account to confirm it have been stymied by receiving two simultaneous email confirmation codes every time I try, which of course confuses the system (and me) to the extent that I have apparently reached the limit of codes I can receive. So I’ll let things calm down a little and see if I can get back in tomorrow. Way too many websites have similar problems with two factor authentication.

Things are even worse with Google. I received their confirmation deposit, and when I went to the Google Play Books Partner Page to enter it, I was greeted with two big red banners…one saying my account was waiting final setup (obviously), and another saying my account had been deactivated.

Except for the banner, it didn’t look deactivated. I wandered around the website at will, confirmed the bank account details, and had no difficulties. A double-check of my email confirmed I had no messages at all from Google about issues with my account. I put in what I hope is a support team request about the issue.

Google is one of my least favorite tech companies. I’ve made a lot of progress de-Googled my digital life – I use Chrome and Chromium-based browsers only when nothing else works, I use Kagi for searching, and have the tiniest possible presence on Gmail: my family still has active Gmail accounts, and I have to maintain an address there to manage those accounts. I also have one Gmail address not associated with my family at all, and this is the account I'm using for the Google Play Books setup. The account itself appears to be fine, email works, etc.

There seems to be no greater fear than that of a Gmail user threatened by losing access to their account, which I can understand. Fortunately that’s not a problem here. Though I’d hate to lose the account, it would be a small blip in my digital life.

I just want to publish my book!