Weekend Wrap-up Dec 17: Lessons Learned

For three years, my first book, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures, was available wide but I have decided to move exclusively to Amazon*, since I made very few sales on the other book channels.

Yes, I made the rookie author mistake of paying to publish my book, but at the time I knew absolutely nothing about the self publishing process, so that seemed to be my best option. … what’s done is done. They did all the work and distribution plus made available David Chilton’s self publishing webinar which provided valuable information.

I assumed I owned the ISBNs (why wouldn’t I, I paid for them), but was informed that was not the case. Now I have to re-publish my books, but knowing what I didn’t know then makes it much easier.

I did find out an interesting fact: One of the perks of being a Canadian author is that we can get free ISBNs (the other is the free healthcare thing). Now, why did I not look this up for three years?

I was also able to reformat my eBook to bring down the file size by compressing the illustrations, thus lowering Amazon’s delivery cost (they already take 30% royalty, greedy bastards), so now it’s only $0.55 (it was over $1). For comparison, my novella with twice as many pages and no illustrations has a $0.06 delivery fee.

I also slipped in a bonus cartoon at the end (shhh).

My main concern is getting the reviews and ratings linked now it has a new ISBN, and It was confirmed that this will not be a problem. My cursor hovered above the “publish my book” button on my KDP dashboard, and with mild trepidation … I clicked.

Now I wait. And while I’m waiting, I’ll got onto publishing the paperback. You don’t have to wait, though:

^{*Yes, despite all the complaining.}

This week on my blog:

Free Book Friday Dec 16: How much is too much?
Weird Wednesday Dec.14
Music Monday Dec 12: Travis and Special Guest

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, and a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words.

My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/