The Ebook has Landed

''This year Amazon has launched the technology to ensure that self-publishing a novel is now only marginally more complex than uploading a Facebook update.'' (Good Housekeeping, Sept 2012 pg.63)

Pain comes in many forms. There is physical pain, mental pain, emotional pain. To which let me now add another category: Amazonal pain. Yes, we (Designer Dave and I) did it. We finally uploaded Jigsaw Pieces. My very first ebook. Ta-daa, roll of drums, waving sparklers in the air, but boy was it tough.
Very, very tough.

So bad did things get, that at one point we found ourselves transferring my entire Google account, including my password, to DD's email address. We do not know why we did this. It had no relevance whatsoever to uploading the book to Amazon. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, I can only put it down to the red mist of madness that descended upon us over the two days it took to achieve upload.

Yes, of course it goes without saying that the writing community rallied round and tried to help. It gathered outside our cage and tossed virtual buns through the bars. We needed to download this platform; we ought to file everything here. Or there. Or somewhere completely different. We needed to indent by a certain specified amount of pixels.

Ah, the pixels. They were a thorough nuisance from the start. I ended up envisaging them as small malevolent wispy things in pointed hats and curly ankle boots. Not sure why they were there, or what exactly they were about, but apparently without a sufficient number of them, nothing could go forward. They appeared to be the digital equivalent of the Lib Dems.

The trouble was that, helpful as all these suggestions were, as was all the stuff we downloaded from various sites, they could not fix the primary problem, which was, in a word: us. Two picky perfectionists determined to bend a second-rate system to our exacting requirements.

So have we finally done it? We think so. You will be the ultimate arbiters of course. One caveat: if you use the cheap version of Kindle, the title and author is slightly offcentre. PLEASE don't tell us. Similarly if you find anything else amiss. Family members and pets have only just emerged from their hiding places, and I am relearning how to use words of more than one syllable.

Sadly, I now realise I have got to the end of this blog post and have not told you a single thing about the actual story. Nor any of the amazing stories behind the story. Another blog, I promise. Meanwhile, why not download Jigsaw Pieces and read it for yourself. It will make all our pain worthwhile.