So now I’m going to talk about things I don’t know/do very well.

Why would I do that? Well, by dint of doing them for…. dear Lord, almost fifteen years now, I’ve gained some competence if not expertise, and also, honestly, as lame as I am, I seem to still know more than a lot of people out there.

If you’re like me, when you’re putting your first novel up on Amazon (the easiest interface, although draft to digital has either gotten easier or I’ve gotten better at it by practice) your heart rate will be going up to a million and you suddenly can’t remember your own name, let alone the book’s title.

And yeah, it’s still like that mumble, mumble … forty? books in. I don’t even know why, so don’t start. At least I’ve stopped feeling like people who buy the novel are going to find me to personally pelt me with rotten fruit. That’s improvement!

Before you feel like a total jackass, I have — and people who I know read this blog — can testify: Put in my name as the title. (Put in my name as the title ON THE COVER also, once.) Put in the title as the Author Name. Put the price of the book (a short story!) as $99. Put the price of a novel as $699. Put the description for a book on another book. Picked the entirely wrong keywords and got my book put in some very weird categories.

The good news is that none of those mistakes are permanent. If you find you’re not even functioning, you’re that nervous, leave the thing and go for a walk. Unless you have set your book to be published on a particular date and are up against the deadline (Which is the first option we’ll discuss, so what we’ll do in this post. More on the next one) a few hours or days won’t make a heck of a lot of difference.

Go for a walk. Take a nap. Drink a glass of water. Get your younger kid to do the actual upload. (What? It worked. Also he offered.) Then do it. Whatever bizarre thing you do, I’ve done it first and worse.

So let’s take this systematically. I assume you’ll remember or be able to get someone who can the title and author’s name.

They then ask you about ISBN. While you don’t need it for an ebook, and I rarely bother, you do need it for paper publishing. Amazon will “give” you one, but it can’t be used anywhere else and limits you a bit.

If you can afford it buy an ISBN which is accomplished at Bowker Identifiers.

Depending on what type of writer you are — I can’t answer this one for you — and how often you’re likely to publish, and also how much cash on hand you have, it might be more economical to buy 1000 ISBNs. I did that 13 years ago, and I’m still working through them, but I’ve used more than you think, because of different editions, and also publishing in other platforms.

Anyway, once you’ve done that and entered everything else (We’ll work on the everything else, including formatting your manuscript the next few weeks) you’ll have to decide if you’re going to release the book immediately or put it on pre-order.

I favor pre-order for various reasons, including that for some reason it’s easier to build excitement for “the book is coming.” And release snippets, etc, to tease the release. Also because it’s what the big boys do, and at least for now you want the reader to perceive the book as traditionally published. (Many readers still think indie is “vanity publishing” and therefore not good enough.)

Now the first time I scheduled a book for release, I gave myself a massive panic attack, and the auto immune episode that almost killed me, and–

The last time I did it was a non-event.

Have I grown less neurotic in the last several years? Ah! I wish.

No, what happened is that I found “this one easy trick.” I schedule the book when it’s basically ready to go, so that if I miss the deadline for uploading the “finished’ manuscript, laugh is on them, it’s already in.

Now… sometimes that is not possible. With No Man’s Land, my copyediting ran long, so I had to upload at the due date. But if the readers had got the previous version, there would just have been a half dozen typos more, so it was no big. The nervous breakdown in covers on that one was special, in that I obsessed the cover was wrong and in the days it was on pre-order went through… 12? covers? We don’t talk about that. No, really. And I hope it doesn’t repeat. But well, it was what it was.

Next week let’s talk about formatting a good looking ebook.