Selling Myself

Little did I know that writing the memoir, adding a workbook and then offering workshops with both would just be the beginning of a journey I was choosing to take.  At the urging of workshop participants, and with chest clenched, I contacted a marketing mavin in LA (the terrific Liz Dubelman),  talked to her for some time, and then took out my checkbook and sent a check. I had no idea what I had signed on for.  First came the updating of my website, which meant changing the platform – even after all the work I’ve done in the the tech universe I’m not sure that the correct word – to WordPress.  The initial web designer didn’t know how to do what Liz said I needed and blamed me for it. True co-dependent that I am it took over a month for me to change designers.  I had to unlearn most of what she had taught me – no easy task for a women who felt totally cowed by ‘tech’ stuff – and then learn the correct way to operate the site, which has over ten tabs (pages).  It felt like a nightmare to me and took hours each day.  Once I had mastered my own website, kind of, I took on mailchimp to learn how to send out newsletters to my growing list of followers, or the list that would grow.  This was also really painful for me, although choosing colors and fonts was kind of fun, or certainly made it bearable.  Then came Facebook and Twitter, which still are not easy for me. During all of this I bought a new computer, and at the urging of Liz, got a Mac. So I had to learn a new computer system, which entailed taking many lessons every time I drove down to Portland to see my younger daughter and her family. The last time I was there, I discovered that she knew less about iphoto than I did, which was a kick.  I had to upload three copies of my book (who knew there even was more than one?!) to the places where they could be sold: the print version, the kindle, and the nook – not the same, of course.  Last week I discovered that the company that had converted the print version to the digital ones had sent me a stranger’s book under my ISBN number for the kindle.  When I received them lo these many months ago, I checked the epub version and not the kindle one.  So for all this time, the digital version of my book has not been for sale at Amazon.com.  I then spent the most frustrating and infuriating week of my recent life trying to find a human to speak with at KindleDirectPublising, a feat I never did manage to accomplish. I did finally ask for a supervisor at regular old Amazon.com, and got same.  She helped quite a bit, though we had to communicate by my sending an email to amazon.com, but never directly to her, which didn’t make sense. Oh well.  Mail order rarely does.  Little did I know that being an author for Amazon is still mail order!  Since the supervisor ‘flagged’  my book, all emails went to her.  Unfortunately, she was off the following week. Though the emails I received from KDP said my book was ‘live’ again, it wasn’t. Whoever made it ‘live’ did it incorrectly, and the umpteen folks I had to talk with thereafter, by email or phone, never checked to see what I meant because they looked at the emails which said it was ‘live’.  You get the picture.  Hours of my time was spent on the phone with one rep after another, daily and to no avail, until the supervisor returned.  She saw all my emails – over twenty by that time – and fixed the problem with a tech in New Zealand and one in India.  She woke me upon Saturday to tell me it was fixed. I had been dreading the weekend, and more calls and emails with Amazon.  Did I check to make sure she was correct.  You betcha!   And writing? This is the first thing I’ve written since the problem began. As for my new novel – I haven’t looked at that in over a year.  As I said when I began this blog:  I had no idea what I was getting into.