As of around 24 hours ago, I’ve uploaded A Sour Chord to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble were quick and painless. After mucking around with my eBook format a few times and testing it on their preview systems, I got it right and had it queued up, selected what countries I wanted to sell in, and set my price. All I have left to do there is click the Publish button on both platforms.
Apple, on the other hand, has a review process built into their system. I won’t even get into what a pain it is to upload your book to their service if you’ve never done it before — they have their own proprietary app that only runs on OS X (not a big deal, I’m a Mac user), which the current version doesn’t work properly — but I managed to get that all sorted out.
I couldn’t find anywhere in their membership agreement, or documentation when I signed up that they can take up to 30 days to approve your book. Apparently it’s the same review process that apps for the App Store go through. I’m not sure if that means I have to wait for someone to actually read the book, or if they just download it, scan through it, and then approve it.
At this point, I’m at the mercy of the might fruit company. My plan is that once they approve the book, I’ll flip the switch on all three services and be for sale all at once. Then I’ll have some updating to do here on the website, including publishing the book details, updating the navigation menu, adding buy links, etc. My task manager app is brimming with things I’ll need to do once I go live.
In case you’re curious, I settled on $3.99 for my initial price and will play with that over time. It’s surprising how much of that money the companies selling for you take. For example, of that $3.99, Amazon will give me $1.40. That’s 35% if you wanted to do the math.
It varies by country, but given that most of my sales will be US based, I’ll get $1.40 per copy sold.
I’m hoping for, and will consider this endeavor a success, if I can sell 100 copies. Fingers crossed! Once this waiting game is over, it’s game on. I don’t want to say that I’ll have to start pimping myself out, but it almost feels that way.