Thanks everyone for your input on my previous question. We (this would be the West household) are going to keep the Author Name under which the stories were originally published.
I have ISBNs! I have a block of one hundred ISBNs! I’m sorry — ISBNs always make me ridiculously happy. It’s a quirk.
Some people might notice that on Smashwords there is one Michelle West novella available; this is because I wanted to make sure that the Smashwords formatting — on my end — actually works. (It does! Yay! It’s the first thing I’ve done so far that’s worked right on the first attempt). It also takes about two weeks for any Smashwords titles to propagate to their various retailer sites.
Because I’m Canadian, there are extra tax forms that need to be filled out, submitted, and acknowledged at any of the various vendors that sell ebooks and with whom I will deal directly. So the second part of this is that I need to be an active account for the paperwork to be relevant.
So…(yes, there’s always more), I also submitted the same short story (Echoes) to the Amazon store and the Apple store. The Apple store apparently takes weeks to review an application to become an iBooks seller (it takes time to review every single book, as well). So the book in the iBooks channel, if I have filled everything out correctly, will also not be available for weeks. (I realize this will not be exciting to many people, as Echoes is one of the stories to be found for downloading for free in the sidebar.)
When I started this, I had the naively optimistic view that the bulk of the time would be spent reading, proof-reading (four different passes on Echoes by me alone, in various formats because changing the way text looks changes the way I catch errors); plus two other proof-readers, and etc.
In the case of Echoes, however, the formatting took far more time. The learning curve here (I typed curb originally, go figure) is probably steeper on my end than it would be on many other people’s. I have learned how to format epub, mobi and MS Word for Smashwords .docs. I have also found, downloaded, filled out W‑8BENs for various vendors (that was today’s ordeal). I have made accounts and uploaded and downloaded to make sure things actually work, where work in this case means that only on the Kobo is an extra page inserted at the end of every section, for reasons I cannot quite figure out. But this happened with the six Kobo samples I downloaded as well, and those were publisher-created epubs.
So…I wanted to let you all know that this is not part of the mass release (which I had intended to do), and it’s not part of the collected six stories (since it’s only one); it’s kind of a lone, floating denizen, sent out into the wilds because it’s proof of my commercial US presence, which will make the W‑8BENs internally relevant to their various vendors, since every entity that sends you any money at all has to have one on file (this would include the agents).
But the other five stories, the collection and with luck, the print-on-demand version of the collection, should appear in a more orderly fashion at the same time (weeks from now), all paperwork having been submitted, all formatting concerns having been addressed, and covers extant. The covers were the easiest part of the process because the person doing those already knows what she’s doing.
At the end of July, I will put up the sample chapter of Cast in Ruin.
Fyreink 
Joey 
DG 
Carol Duffy 
Hilda 
Jacob 
RSS - Posts
Congratulations! I look forward to ordering the trade paperback when it’s available.
Also, I see this as a fitting accomplishment considering that you’re coming up on your 20th anniversary of being published. I hope you have something special planned for you and your loved ones.