Over the last three days I have spent many hours at the computer trying (without success) to upload my latest work to the marketplace. There is a lot to be said for being an independent author—I get to write what I want and I am in control (sort of) all the way—choosing the cover; choosing the title; choosing the number of pages/words I spend telling the story. There are expenses. I am a writer, not a designer, so for that I hire a professional. I usually hire some person with knowledge of the setting and subject matter of my novels to vet what I write for accuracy. I often travel to the sites to see for myself where my character would walk and live.
But all of that work pales into oblivion on the day I sit down to post the work on one of the major distributors of books to bookstores and libraries and readers like you who like to order online. My latest work is a memoir about my husband’s last six months of life and my first two years alone. I call it The “W” Word—One Woman’s Journey TO and THROUGH Widowhood.
As of this writing, it is available in Kindle version on amazon.com. My struggle is with getting it posted in print format. To that end I have filled out online forms repeatedly; spoken to 4-5 “chat” or telephone agents, and still, when I click “PUBLISH,” I get an error message asking me to fix the highlighted errors (of which there are none). After two days of this, the message did appear saying the issue had to do with the ISBN number assigned, so I started over and tried fixing that. More conversations with chat operators (and no, by this time I was not being very nice!) with no results. Finally, a chat operator got so frustrated with me that she passed me off to a supervisor (something I had requested repeatedly over the last week).
Just got an email from said supervisor telling me the problem is the title of my book does not match “precisely” the title recorded in Books in Print…meaning I have a typo (no) or an extra space (no) or ????? My hope is that by the time you read this, it will simply make you commiserate with similar frustrations you may have experienced trying to get something corrected. My hope is you will be able to simply click on THIS LINK and order my memoir!