I uploaded two collections just now to Amazon. One three-book and one four-book, containing my nonfiction titles with the Indie author in mind.
Granted, I wasn't keeping a strict accounting of my time involved, but here's a pretty good breakdown for my future use, which may be of import to some of you as well:
1. ONE HOUR - Looked everywhere for my missing Word document for one of the ebooks that served as part of both collections. This would fall under that Miscellaneous category for things we do not expect to happen, much less have to deal with. Grrr.
2. ONE HOUR - Retyping document into Word from my Kindle ebook. Notice it took just as long to recreate the doc as it did trying to find the doc. Sigh.
3. TWO HOURS - Combining the four ebooks into one and needing one master Table of Contents, but two of the four had their own internal TOC. So I had to newly designate an endless array of titles to NOT be included in the overview TOC. And for some reason after copying the individual docs into one, I had weird character fonts show up by paragraphs. Anyway, fixed that too. Also, I spell-checked the document afterward out of an abundance of caution.
4. TWO HOURS - Uploading and previewing, with an emphasis on the previewing part, followed by adjusting my Word doc each time in hopes to solve the glitches I saw on Preview.
And just to clarify, all four of these nonfiction titles I had written last year and uploaded as singles. Since I am not qualified to do these beautiful 3-D covers for the intended collections, my artist, Ron Perovich, worked his magic and provided me with them earlier this month. So that took care of the creation part and the cover art part.
5. HALF HOUR - Now, remember, I had two collections in mind. So once the four-book one was successfully loaded, it took only an additional half hour to tweak it into the three-book collection I also wanted.
Wow! That entails the top two items on my short list of five. The remaining three are my WIPs with WCs less than 7K. I need to read them and assess their viability for a short story, a novella or a novel. I'm so jazzed I might even get to one of those tomorrow.
Doesn't it just feel great when something you've been dreading and procrastinating about turns out to be a job done in less than seven hours?
I maintain it was because one of our homework assignments in my creativity class was to make a list of our five topmost things we would like to get to by year-end (or whatever date we wished—December 1 for me).
Physically writing the list must have alerted my subconscious and, believe me, I had already worked almost six hours on a freelance copyediting job earlier today. So I no plans whatsoever to start (much less finish) these two personal projects into the evening hours of November 17, yet looky here! I beat my optimistic deadline by like almost two weeks.
A-mazing! Carry on, all.
Denise Barker, author + blogger + copy
editor
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