Proof Copies by Misha Herwin

 

Due to circumstances beyond my control, this is going to be a rather late and very short post. It may also be a salutary one for anyone who is self-publishing through KDP.

“Vladimir the Vampire’s Cat,” is a picture book for kids, written by me and illustrated by Duncan Bourne. It’s a project we’ve been working on for over a year and since neither of us had ever done anything like this before it’s been somewhat of a learning curve. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Duncan’s wife, the wonderful Michelle then I don’t think we’d have ever got to this stage. I write and Duncan draws but she has the expertise in formatting, which is what we needed.

A few of weeks ago, we spent an afternoon pooling our talents and produced what we thought was going to be the final version of our book.  It looked great and we were all pleased with the results so we scheduled publication day and then, almost as an afterthought sent away for proof copies.

When they arrived it seemed, at first glance, that all was well. It took a night's sleep for me to realise that this was far from so. First of all the front matter had an amateur look about it, then there were gaps at the bottom of some of the pages and the frontispiece would look better later on in the book. None of these problems would be too difficult to fix. However, what we hadn’t realised was that we couldn’t replace the old version with the corrected one, because once you've uploaded your book and selected a date for publication Amazon locks any editing.

The only way round this appears to be to publish straight away, send for a proof, do the corrections and then upload the right version. At which point you can start marketing even though the book is already live. 

All of which seems rather Kafkaesque and not particularly helpful for anyone concerned.

Still, we’ll know for next time.