At last..

Big day! I’ve just this very moment finally uploaded the first Sixteen Press e-book, The Great Deep and Tales of the Uncanny , to both Kindle and Kobo. In a couple of days the book will be officially available on both Amazon and Kobo. And then we’ll see what happens!After humming and haa-ing for ages, and reading through any amount of people’s experiences, I’ve chosen the 70 percent royalty option on Kindle–the size of my book is not large and delivery costs are minimal. Of course that 70 percent royalty only applies in certain territories, including  the US and UK and Europe, but not including my primary market of Australia. Kobo’s different and was also very simple to use, simpler even than Kindle in some ways. Not sure yet about going through the Apple store, of course it would be great, but it does look somewhat complicated.

I could have gone initially through an aggregator like Smashwords but as my file was already in EPub format through pressbooks, it wasn’t the best option. I may go through that route another time, just to check which is best.

Have sent a letter to the IRS re being knocked back for an ITIN but I’m not holding my breath they’ll respond positively! So for the moment am just going,  as far as Amazon is concerned, through paying the US withholding tax and then seeing if I can get back at least some of it through the Australian tax system. Another irritating thing with Amazon is that they’ll be paying in cheques/checks in American dollars, because I don’t have a US or UK bank account. But Kobo’s great because you don’t need an ITIN and they pay in Australian dollars into your local nominated bank account. Much more flexible for us non-US and non-UK-based self-publishers!

I changed a few things about the file over the last few months, took out some of the photos so that theey wouldn’t be too distracting, played around with formatting etc, ran the complete file through the E-Pub validator online(an excellent free service for self-publishers by the way, and absolutely invaluable. More housekeeping to do now–register my book’s ISBN in Books in Print, books in publication, etc etc, but very soon I’ll be able to announce the actual arrival of the e-book in the e-tailers, which is great. It’s been a bit of a long haul, longer than I anticipated when I first started, but it’s all a learning experience, isn’t it!