Uploading my First Book and My First Sale

I published the first book in my Consort of the Werewolf King series and it went live on Amazon last night. I had already discovered last night that, to my horror, I’d uploaded my ebook file with the title ‘Claimed by the Alpha’. That was going to be the title of the first book so was present in my files and I completely missed it when I looked for problems with the file. It was the first time I’d created an ebook and it took a lot of iteration before I got it right. So whilst I was fretting about the general layout and trying to understand how to get everything where I needed it, the fact I had the wrong title on some pages and had also used it as the name of the book on Amazon escaped my notice.

I’ve never heard an indie author say their book launches have gone perfectly but it’s still frustrating to come so close to getting it right and be let down by my own brain scanning things rather than reading them. On the plus side Amazon advised me there was one possible spelling mistake (correct, it was a Latin name that I got wrong in one place) and so I was able to correct that at the same time. The downside is that the updated ebook file won’t go live immediately and nor will the name change on the Amazon site so currently it still says ‘Claimed by the Alpha’ rather than ‘Bitten by the Alpha’.

After I’d done that and set up my Amazon Central author page (which can only be done after the first book is published, somewhat bizarrely) I made a few updates to the website as well. Hopefully, everything is working as intended now but given the title problem I’m sure I’ll find more to deal with later.

I checked out my book pages on Amazon and Amazon and noticed that on the U.S. site I have a book ranking of 186,475 which means I must have sold one. Sure enough, I checked the back end reporting and I had indeed, already sold one copy. I will never know who that person was but I’m incredibly grateful to them for buying the first ever copy of my first ever novella. I was like an excited kid, bouncing up and down in my chair with glee as I stared at that glorious sale. My first ever impact as an author, here’s to many more in the future.