Behind the scenes of Dear Evil Tester : Hitting Publish

Today became “Dear Evil Tester” launch day.

Surprise!

I suspect ‘professionals’ create a plan and stick to it. I’m more of a kanban, ship it when it is ready, kind of guy.

On the 16th March, I received a final proof copy, and I reviewed that. Then on the 17th I hit publish.

I found the free pdf comparison tool “diff-pdf” very useful for final leanpub print ready pdf comparison during my final proof phase.

The launch process proceeded as follows:

• start at leanpub
• check the book details
• realise you haven’t added a price
• add price (make it slightly cheaper than amazon kindle because of the difference in royalty rates)
• click publish
• check the page looks OK in incognito mode
• tweet
• tweet that a sample is available now so people can try before they buy
• move on to createspace
• click publish
• stare at the message that says “this might take 3-4 days” and wonder how people manage to create a co-ordinated launch across all platforms
• move on to kdp (kindle direct publishing)
• click publish
• again stare aghast at the “this might take 3-4 days” message
• be amazed as you start responding to peeps tweets about buying the book. Thank you all.
• see that Amazon.co.uk have listed the book for sale
• tweet that
• start editing all your web pages
• notice that the feedjs server you were relying on for your rss feeds has stopped responding, so create a new endpoint for your existing rss caching to work on different sites
• notice that the kindle version has been published
• tweet that
• respond to more peeps tweets. Thank you all again.
• Write a promotional blog post

I still have more to do in the launch.

• make sure Amazon notice that the paperback and kindle book are actually the same book and are listed together
• create a leanpub promo video
• amend the sales pages

But overall, the ‘publish’ part of ‘self publishing’ has become quite smooth.
Thank you for your support.