I made mistakes publishing my first book, which made my next books better. Not only do I post these publishing mishaps for the morbidly curious, but also so I can reference these posts in the future to not make the same mistake twice.
I can pretty much guarantee that every time you publish a book (or arguably, do anything of consequence), you’ll mess something up. And that’s okay, because you’ll learn from it and do better next time. I sure will!
So for those curious what I messed up while publishing the Unfixed duology, enjoy….
Publishing mishap #1: Mixing up the timing for copyright & LCCN
I remembered from publishing IKYLAM that I want to register copyright and obtain a Library of Congress Control Number when publishing Unfixed, but it’d been awhile so I mixed up my memory of the best timing. I submitted my copyright registration before publication (it’s better to register copyright after publication, for my purposes at least) and waited on LCCN til after publication – which then meant I had extra work modifying the file later to have the LCCN on the copyright page as required. Thankfully, publishing a duology, I got to do it right the second round and hopefully remember better next time.
Publishing mishap #2: Didn’t test shipping options before launch
This was old hat, I figured. I already am selling one product from my site without issue, and this is just adding another. No biggie.
But joke is on me. At some point, my shipping options had broken with a setting to only ship to addresses “in the US and out of the US”. As in must meet both criteria instead of either/or, which of course means nowhere matched.
I fixed the issue when a customer alerted me, but who knows how many people went elsewhere to purchase (where I receive smaller percentage royalties) or forgot to purchase later because of my mistake.
Publishing mishap #3: Mailed a customer’s payment to another customer
As an indie author, selling books directly has a lot of administrative processes to keep up with, and I sure thought I had them down. But sometimes I’m still just one human shipping out books to fans and figuring this whole thing out, as evidenced so clearly here.
You may wonder “how in the world do you accidentally mail a customer’s payment to someone else?” I get it. I was silly and when collecting payment tucked it into another book’s cover so I wouldn’t lose it (haha. ha. ha.). Then shipped that book out with preorders and wondered where in the world that check went off to later.
Unbeknownst to me, one of these books has money inside….
Luckily, out of all the preorders, the person who received the erroneous payment was my brother. It was a definite facepalm moment, but all ended well. And yes, I never before or since have tucked payments into products “for safekeeping.”
Publishing mishap #4: Broke redirect links & sent customers nowhere
“Get this lady a tech professional!” you’re all probably thinking at this point. I hear ya. Hang tight, this error gets a tad technical….
So here’s the thing. I could tell people to order at AmyLSauder.com/Product/Unfixed but it’s a bit of a mouthful. So there’s this nifty thing called redirects, so that AmyLSauder.com/Unfixed goes to the longer URL. Easy peasy. Right???
Nope. You see, social media has click tracking that adds more to the end of links. Turns out, there’s this fun little checkbox in the redirect settings that I missed, to indicate whether the redirect should work with any of that extra tracking at the end. And I had that set up wrong, which means any time someone clicked my “easy” link from social, they were sent to an error page instead of a product page. Oops!
This gets better (worse)…I only discovered this error after the 2nd book in my duology launched. Yes, this error existed for the entire Unfixed preorder/launch period, and the entire Picked Up Pieces preorder period until a customer alerted me. Sure, I’d tested the redirects, but never from social media…I didn’t realize I needed to. Double oops!
Tip: Please alert small businesses to issues if you see them. If they’re anything like me, they’re ever so grateful; there’s only so much monitoring one person can do, and tech loves to regularly change things up.
I can only hope in the meantime that others figured out the error and got to the right page for the product, but again, who knows which customers purchased elsewhere or planned to purchase later then forgot.
Big picture: What’d I learn?
With the mistakes publishing my first book a few years ago, it was clear I was figuring out the publishing process and the learning curve there. Looking at the publishing mishaps this round, I think the pattern is more about the learning curve of making things more scalable with tech solutions and business processes. I’m not there yet, but I’m further along than I was last time, and next time I’ll be further along yet. Thanks for sticking with me through the bumps and snafus.
I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at author launch life 🙂
