Counting Pennies!

My Most Frequent Reaction to the Discovery of Other People

I got a notification from KDP that the platform is about to give me a whole penny. A whopping whole penny, guys!

For context, someone in Japan bought (or borrowed) one of my books off the platform, so I am getting a royalty- a small percentage of the sales price.

I get a little giddy whenever I get one of these notifications. For one thing, I'm now burning with curiosity. What did this random person buy? Why? At an intellectual level, I am aware that putting books on a platform can lead to people seeing and reading my work, but it always boggles my mind when it actually happens. I thought, in my heart where the real thoughts lie, that I was shouting into the void. But no, there is a world outside of Plato's Cave.

That metaphor doesn't work well, but I'll pretend that it does.

My point is that I just received a reminder that other people exist and are interacting with my books in some way through the Amazon website. The timing is interesting. The Redwood Writer's group that I belong to was name dropping publishing platforms a month or so ago, and the merger of Smashwords and Draft2Digital came up. I looked up Draft2Digital and was at once intrigued by the promise of uniform front and back matter, along with a relatively easy uploading system. Imagine my books having a copyright page that looks like a copyright page in literally all of its iterations without my having to carefully copy one out by hand each time I finish a story.

Formatting always irritates me. It hits me in the lazy nerve, of which mine is particularly active, and it makes me nervous to boot. Am I doing it correctly? Which boxes do I need to check, and which makes me look like an amateur? Plus, by the time you are formatting the front and back matter, you have written, re-written, revised, edited, and re-written again the story. Aren't we done yet? Offering to do the table of contents, acknowledgements, copyright page, and title page for the author is a Syren song just from the perspective of getting an expert to do what they are good at instead of shouldering it myself.

And this person buying the book, whatever book it was, reminds me that people are looking at the books and naturally judging them. They have to.

The penny also reminds me that the drawback of using KDP is that there is only one place to get your hands on my work, which limits the number of people who can, or want, to get it. If something happens there, my books only exist on a USB drive.

Smashwords tempted me once with wider markets, but the inertia of doing what I'm familiar with got in the way, along with the threat of having to specially format the books for their word grinder. Easy the formatting may be, but KDP offers to upload whatever you hand them with zero comments or special formatting.

Of course, that's why KDP is rife with 700,000 word copy and paste jobs that look, read, and, in fact are, crap. There is a virtue in gatekeeping, in the end. You eliminate the clueless from your list of authors.

So, shockingly, there are other people in this universe, and they are seeing the books as I could bring myself to make them look. A nerve-wracking thought, but a hopeful one. Someone thought one book was formatted sensibly enough to sample the contents! We'll see how they feel about that once they get there, and that is a whole other worry.