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The Longest Launch: I Am Going Camping With Dad

sherryshearhart

I am so happy that I Am Going Camping With Dad is now released. I was beginning to think it was never going to get published. After a month of trying with Ingram Spark and ultimately having no success I was getting very discouraged. I felt like Hades with exploding hair. From difficulties to uploading the document and then when I finally did the document was rejected, the only voice I could hear was the voice of a security system saying “ACCESS DENIED, ACCESS DENIED”. Ingramspark customer service was of no help because it was back and forth emails that didn’t address the problem and they don’t do over the phone customer service. Then I went back to Amazon. I was having trouble uploading my file yet again. For the life of me, I couldn’t pinpoint what was being done wrong, as I had successfully uploaded the first book. However, Amazon has great customer service and they called me back within two minutes of my request for help and the problem got sorted.



1- I had put my newly designed image of a logo in the book. Which the file was reading as plagiarized because the text in the logo wasn’t directly typed in a document. 2- I had labeled the file a pdf in order to know it wasn’t the ebook file for uploading. So the file was labeled as a pdf.pdf and that was registering the file as a corrupt file. So to fix this I simply removed the logo image and changed the title of the file without putting pdf in the file title. The book had finally been approved by Amazon. I began calling out for a launch party. A launch party consists of individuals that are interested in helping you spread the word about your book and leave reviews on you selling sites in exchange for a copy of your book for free. This is so important with self publishing because if no one knows who you are, they won’t buy your book. Until Amazon gets 50 reviews they won’t help to promote your book either. Those 50 reviews are really hard to get! I knew I needed to have this book out by Father’s Day. The title is I am going camping with Dad and June is the international month of camping. So I needed to have the book released during this time to give it its best shot for starter sales. I ordered my author copies of the book and then bam! There was a printing problem.



All the illustrations were white washed and faded. I was in a panic. I needed to prepare for the book launch, the release date had already been announced and yet I didn’t have a quality copy of the book to put my name behind! I called Amazon and was refunded my money. I had to wait 72 hours before re ordering so they could deal with the problem with the printers. I was so stressed out. So I waited patiently. I re ordered. My author copies came in 5 days before the release date. They were fixed. But now I had exactly 5 days to get my author copies out to locations as far as Hawaii! I knew they would not all arrive on time. The book was released on the 19th and I had exactly 1 week to organize the launch party. Everything for the launch was so last minute. And it reflected in how many people actually attended. Did I enjoy myself at the book launch party? Yes, I did.


Really great and loyal people showed up and we had a great launch. I will say that with self publishing it is so hard to launch a book. You can't do pre orders through Amazon for print books. So you don’t know how long it will take to have your book go live and when it does people can purchase right away; before you can check the print quality. I am hoping next time around this all goes so much smoother and better! But what I do have are 2 published books. Book two is even better than book one; because I made sure I put what I wanted into the book and nothing was left out due to rushing. The website got a boost of new activities and I am quite proud of them .Even with all the frustrations this time around I am still in this publishing journey. More stories are in the works. Please pick up your copy of I Am Going Camping With Dad. Try out the activities and let me know how you feel about them. And don’t forget to post a review on Amazon after you read the book, because it helps me a lot!




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