As many of you will know, I have many publications available for you to read: some poetry anthologies, an essay, and some short stories.
I am quite hard on myself, but I do consider myself successful in regards to where I am in life, and where I want to take myself. My biggest weakness in life — I would say — is that I am very hard on myself, and I do have the tendency to beat myself up.
Self-publishing, and everything that goes with it, is reliant on my hard work. I don't necessarily get the support that I would get from a publisher or agent, if I were to go down the traditional publishing route. If you check out my books, you'll notice that I publish on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). All the writing that I publish is heavily reliant on that service being available.
It doesn't look like Amazon is going to suddenly dissolve or collapse anytime soon, but that does not mean that they will not suddenly close or shut down my KDP account, for whatever reason. Particularly as it seems there has been a crack-down on 'bot accounts' popping up on the site, which has meant that genuine, 'human', accounts have been taken down. Also, I am lucky in the sense that I have had no issues since first publishing nearly two years ago — but there is always a chance that something will go wrong (as with anything in life).
There are many other places I could publish my books, but it is the organisation, and transferring all my content over to another site, that worries me.
It's all a process. A long, and tedious, process.
What if some of my content gets lost in the process of transferring it all?
What if this new site makes it hard for me to share my books?
What if this new site is hard for other people, who have not heard of it, to access and use?
As I mentioned above, nothing bad has actually happened, it's just me thinking about the 'what-ifs', and what I would do in what I would consider to be the worst case scenario. There are options. Some of which I like more than others, but a decision would be made when, and if, I find myself in that situation.
Say Amazon were to permanently delete my account, and I have to transfer to a different named site or publishing opportunity — however brief the interlude — would I still be an author if my books weren't available to be read? Linked in with this is the idea that, if my books are not available to be read, I would be losing an income stream, and sitting there, putting it into a position of people being aware that my publications are available would feel like starting from square one. Not true, of course — square one would be if I had never published a book ever. I am so much more knowledgeable than I was when I started writing properly a few years ago.
It would be completely different site (obviously); I'd have to get used to different processes, different interfaces, different software. Not to mention the fact that my covers and my formatting would change, depending on a site's regulations and requirements. That really terrifies me, because it is an intricate detail that I need to get perfect.
I'm no stranger to perfectionism, and needing an eye for detail; in fact, in a way, I pride myself on that. I don't consider myself particularly good at book formatting and book cover alignment, because it is more about spatial awareness and numbers and — as a writer —that isn't great. However, I know it's something that I would be able to handle should the situation arise, because I've been through many situations that felt like they were not going to get better...most of the time, they actually turned out fine.
Even if I were to be a traditionally published author, there is a risk that the publisher or the agent would drop me for whatever reason; the most common I've seen is that they've gone out of business.
So, if a writer does not have a publisher or an agent (in the case of self-publishing, a platform) — would that make me think that they are no longer a published author? No, it would not, because there would still be books circulating. The book has been published. And I'm sure another publisher would pick the books, given the opportunity — in the same way I would be able to transfer my books onto a different site.
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