The cover design and upload went so well it was alarming. So when the power surged and my computer shut itself off in the middle of my work (despite being backed up by a surge protector whose sole job it is to prevent such a thing) I actually sighed in relief. “Okay. Whew…there’s the screw-up for today.”  However, Murphy’s Law is late today, because the upload had completed prior to shutting down.

Once I finished uploading the material,  I began filling out the Create Space Amazon store requirements. I had to choose a price, fill out the description, write a bio and choose my publishing category and key search words.

If you think that didn’t cause some anxiety, then you haven’t been reading this blog on the regular, have you?  😉

Price? What should I charge? It told me based on the page count in my book that my minimum price had to be $8.90. I settled on $12.99 so that Rachael and I could at least get $2 each in royalties for every book sold.

(As a sidebar, it calculated my page count at 226, which is my birth date, and the deadline I gave myself. I am SO considering that a sign.)

The description was a little bit easier since I just copied that from the back of the book. Our bios in the book are MUCH too long, so I read an article that suggested being short, funny, and truthful. THAT I can do with no problem.

The real hair puller was what category to put the book in. Filmmaking? Memoir? Devotional? IT IS ALL OF THOSE. This is what we get for writing something abnormal. I called my Mom, who helped me narrow it down to Performing Arts/Filmmaking/General.

For the key words, I just picked things that I would look up if I was on Amazon and searching for a Filmmaking/Memoir/Set-Diary/How-To manual. I’m probably the only one that would conduct such a search, but there you go; it’s done.

After completing all these steps, the website told me that they had to review everything and they’d email me when the review was complete. It may take up to 24 hours, so I have to wait.

Wait…what?

I thought that’s what Internet was for…Instant gratification! Not so. After I get the go-ahead, it could be another 3-5 days before my Amazon store is actually published. If it’s three, I still have a chance of making my birthday deadline, and that’s only if everything is perfect. If it’s five, I’ll have missed my deadline, but I’ll give myself a pass since I completed all the steps I possibly could before that time.

What to do while I wait? I have lines to study, a theatre program to design, and emails to send. On the outside, I won’t look idle at all, but on the inside, I’m gonna look a whole lot like this person’s cat (whoever they are) from my Google Search of “Images of Cat Waiting.”

Right at 35 days before my 35th birthday, Rachael and I found out that a book we wrote about our experience making our first film “No Lost Cause,” was being returned to us by the publisher after a year of waiting for it to be printed. Instead of wallowing in our collective misery, I committed to blogging every day while I searched for ways to overcome this perceived rejection and obstacle to our goal. I currently also have about three other projects brewing at the same time, and write about the progress of each of them. This is part of that series.

Read the first entry here: https://ashleyraymerbrown.com/2015/01/23/35-days-to-35-dealing-with-rejection/