On Writing & Storytelling: The Woes of the Impatient, Impetuous Author

The new cover art for the Kindle edition of my novella. ©2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and KDP. 

 

        Reunion v. 1.0

As I mentioned in my most recent blog post, I spent all last weekend and Monday (and up to early Tuesday morning) revising my novella Reunion: A Story.  I wrote the original version sometime in 1998, using much of an old writing exercise from a creative writing course I took back in 1987 as a foundation for the story.

For many years, I transferred the Microsoft Word file with the original draft of Reunion from one computer to another but never did anything useful with it. Oh, I showed it to potential girlfriends and other friends who I thought might enjoy it. I even asked one of my business writing clients to print one copy for me; she owned a printing shop, and since I wasn’t asking for a hardcover edition, she gladly granted me that small boon. (I later loaned that copy to a neighbor, but I never got it back.)

As the third anniversary of my mother’s death approached in late June of 2018, I decided to publish Reunion on Amazon through its CreateSpace Independent Publishing arm. I had already self-published Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad, and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer six years before, so I remembered (sort of, anyway) how to upload files, preview the book online, order author’s proof copies, set prices, and other similar things.

This is the view from KDP's Kindle Create app. 

I admit it: I was in a rush to publish Reunion – or any other story, really – not just to get the story “out there” for readers to buy and hopefully enjoy, but also to show certain people that I could write something that would appeal to a cross-section of readers and, in the process, make some money.

Now, I’m not going to say I didn’t do any proofreading or copy editing before I uploaded the manuscript file to what Amazon now called Kindle Direct Publishing. Reunion is a story I am emotionally invested in, and I do take my writing seriously. So, yes, I went over the draft I was sending to Amazon a few times, made a few minor changes here and there, and when I didn’t see too many glaring errors, I went through the uploading process, chose my royalties plan and my preferred marketing strategy, set prices for both the e-book and the paperback, then waited till the Kindle edition to go “live.” (Reunion went live as a digital book on June 28, 2018; the paperback edition followed four days later.)

        Revising Reunion

 

Here, Kindle Create generates a preview of what the finished product will look like on a Kindle tablet. 

Well, as you know, as good as its story and characters are, Reunion needed various changes, including the addition of a copyright notice and a “This is a work of fiction…” disclaimer. In my haste to publish the novella, I neglected to include those in the first edition.

And if it had not been for my former journalism professor from Miami-Dade Community College – South Campus, who cared enough about me and the book to let me know I needed to add them, I wouldn’t have taken the time to do the revisions I ended up doing.

        The Importance of Being Patient

 

The first edition of Reunion in a photo by Nelson Castillo. 

On Tuesday, I ordered what I hoped would be a copy of the second revised edition with the new and improved version of Reunion. I knew that the edits were starting to appear on the e-book; I had been uploading “fixes” to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) since Friday, so the process of switching from the ’18 version to the 2023 one had started.

Unfortunately, in my excitement to republish my novella – remember, I uploaded the last batch of edits and a new cover design for the paperback edition after midnight on Tuesday – I forgot that there’s a 72-hour window between submission and publication of a book via KDP’s Kindle Create app.

Well, I received my copy of Reunion yesterday – that was quick! – and it turns out that the edition Amazon sent me is the first unrevised edition.

Oh well. I’ll wait till Amazon finishes updating the Reunion product page, then I’ll re-order it. (I get 60% royalties, so I’ll get some of my money back anyway.)