Challenges for an INDIE Author

This weekend has been a bit challenging for me. There were lots of really great things that happened, like on Friday, I had a good interview with a participant for the Tattoo women's project And on Saturday, my son had a final soccer tournament and they won gold. So some of the weekend was totally awesome. But what took me for a tail spin was when my book Ursula’s Umbrellas was delivered on Friday night to my door. I opened it thinking it was going to look exactly like the copy I had already proofed. Nope. For some reason, for god only knows what reason, my computer had glitched and eliminated the whole copyright section and glitched one of the pictures making one character disappearing between the pages. Now this was devastating for three reasons. One, I had worked on re-doing the illustrations for the past year and this was to be the final copy. This book has been in a state of perfecting since 2007. That is a long time to be tweaking a children's book. But because of new programs being developed and the self publishing industry always on the change, Ursula’s Umbrellas changed with it. Second reason, Indie authors are frowned upon by many people because the quality of our work isn’t always on par with the traditionally published authors. Truth is, many indie authors do not have the funds to compete with the big publishing houses. Most writers struggle financially and to have a publishing team...you have to put out the money. So for me to have a book that is now flawed, I am horribly embarrassed. And third thing is that I really wanted to be done with this book. I was done. Oh, and a fourth thing, this means my computer is completely messed up. I knew it had some issues, but this!  Good grief.

Of course I went crying to my Oracle cards, “Why, why did this happen? “  Its reply, Reversed “by the book”.  Lol   Yup, and ya can’t make this shit up...it actually had “by the book” in protective position.

Well, It is in the Amazon and Barnes & Noble bookstore and I am leaving it there. Still the same great story and illustrations, just the technical book info is gone. Sigh. Kids will never know the difference. It’s done, I’m done, and moving on to my new project.

Did I mention, I caught the flu.

Thanks for listening!

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