Self-Publishing My Crochet Book

My book came! It came! I was gone on Friday and my book arrived while I was gone. My son placed my book in my office and I didn’t see it until almost midnight on Saturday. My book was here an entire day and I didn’t know! When I discovered the package, I thought it was something else I was expecting. I was so surprised and elated when I opened the package and it was two copies of my book.

It’s here! It’s here!

I wanted to call my sisters and friends but understood they might not appreciate it if I woke them up. I had to wait until Sunday morning to bombard everybody. I did, however, take a chance and texted my sis-in-law because she has a reputation for staying up late. Luckily she was up, and I was able to share. It was very emotional, more than I expected. I know that any new book by an unknown author, much less a self-published book, doesn’t face good odds, but that doesn’t matter. I was holding in my hands something I had worked on for years (YEARS) and it looked good! I didn’t realize how worried I was that once I got it, I would be disappointed. I was very happy with the pictures in the digital format of the ebooks, but printed…I wasn’t so sure. Also, the quality of the paperback could have been terrible. I had no idea how Amazon produced the books. But I wasn’t disappointed. It looks great! It looks like a real book! 😍 There are things I would do a little differently for the next book (there will be a next book 😀) but overall, I’m over the moon.

It’s a real book!

The pictures look good.

Reflection On The Process

Let me reflect on my process for self-publishing my crochet book. If you’d like to go back and read my previous posts about it, I’ll add links at the bottom.

I took the forced hiatus from work due to the pandemic to uber focus on finishing my book. I wrote it in iBooks Author, an application from Apple that allows you to self-publish to Apple Books directly. It was a huge learning curve for me to use the app, but I finally became adequate enough to get a copy I liked. Once done, I created a pdf so I could then format it on Amazon’s software, and then submit it to Amazon as a pdf. Sounded simple enough (not!), until it was time to actually submit.

I started with Amazon because once I formatted on their app, I could upload directly to Amazon and submit all my information there on the site. It was pretty straight forward and I got my ebook up without any trouble. There was a waiting period but it was up by the next day.

Then it was time to submit to Apple Books and that was more of a struggle. I had to jump through more hopes and wait longer to get the book approved. Their wait period was more like three weeks, only to find out there was an error that was confusing to fix. Suffice it to say, it was a longer, more confusing process that took me three tries submitting the book, but in the end, I finally got my book up and live. THEN I found out that they listed my book for the wrong price, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. They had it for 99 cents! That was a problem because Amazon has a rule that you can’t have the book priced for less somewhere else. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t stress too much about it either. I doubted Amazon was going to notice until I started making sales.

Once the book was up on both sites and available as ebooks, I switched over to figuring out how to format the book for a physical version to be available on Amazon. That wasn’t easy at all. Amazon has great instructions but sometimes you have to jump around to make sure you’re doing everything right. It took me about a month to finally get it formatted correctly. It took a lot of research, but I got it done and uploaded.

That’s when I stalled for a few months while I waited for my hubby to finish my cover for the physical book. I talked about that in a previous post. Once the cover was done, I uploaded that puppy and made my book live. I ordered a copy so I could see the quality of the book before I tried convincing folks to give my book a try.

I also went back to Apple and figured out how to fix the pricing problem. I emailed them and they sent me a very quick response that fixed the problem. So now, everything is up and ready to go and I can work on promotion and figuring out the next steps.

In addition to finishing my cover, my hubby also created a website for me! That was a nice surprise! I knew we would get to it eventually, but he made it a priority to finish it by our anniversary this month. I love it! I hope you check it out at yochet.com. The site has a link back to my blog so I don’t have to switch that over. I may have to switch at some point but I like my blog and am glad it’s one less thing to worry about.

There’s a lot to think about now, but no matter what, I’m going to ride this happy high for awhile. 😊

Past posts

April 9

April 7

March 31

March 17, 20219

July 27, 2018

No doubt there are more from going way back, but that’s as much as I’m willing to admit for now about how long it’s taken me.