I submitted last year’s book, The Scrambled Man, to Amazon today.

I followed their guidelines for making it Kindle friendly, although I didn’t do the “active table of contents” thing ’cause it was too damned complicated, like I said yesterday. And I gave it a cover page, albeit a minimal one. I am pondering doing a new one that’s an image with some vaguely appropriate image from public domain clipart. Just so it looks like something.

And I wrote a description for it. A nice, punchy, gets to the point back-cover type description. I assume that, like the back of a traditional ink on paper book, this will largely be what sells the book, and so I did my best to make it engaging.

I will probably go back and see if I can tune it further eventually. It is, after all, a rough draft.

Plus I had to submit my American tax information, which seems like a step I could skip, right? But no, I had to fill out a (very brief) form declaring that I am definitely not American. A certificate of foreignness, I suppose. So to the American government, I am a certified non-American now.

Isn’t bureaucracy fun?

The book’s called The Scrambled Man. It’s about a future society where teleportation has become commonplace. Every city has at least one teleportation center. They’re sort of like airports, but the journey is WAY faster and cheaper.

The teleportation industry has been running smoothly for at least a decade when one day, during a routine teleportation, something unexpected materializes : the randomized remains of a man. All the cells are there but they have been scrambled, as though someone took a person apart cell by cell then put him back together at random.

The world is shocked by this grisly turn of events, and it is up to Adam Eden, the world’s first genetically perfect man, and his team of investigators to find out what happened.

I think it’s quite good, but I might be biased.

It will sell for $3. I chose that price because I thought it was the right balance between being understandably affordable, seeing as I am a nobody in the writing biz, while not making the book seem cheap and hence worthless.

I will get around $2.08 per sale. Pretty small beans, but hey. It will be available to pretty much every human being on earth with an Internet connection. So in that sense, it’s a hell of a good distribution deal.

Of course, that alone won’t make anyone buy it. I will leave it up there and see if it generates any sales at all, but I am willing to consider doing some kind of “get it free” limited time promotion. I’d like to get paid something for my writing, but for now, the most important thing is to get people actually reading my stuff.

A friend of mine suggested I should get a second reader first. You know, someone to read the thing and give me their critique before I go off making it available for all to see.

That is absolutely the smart, sensible thing to do. But I am learning that what is smart and sensible is not necessarily what will be the most effective. Every artist serves their muse, and mine is impatient and unstable. So I have to get things done when I have the will and the energy and the courage to do them. If I had waited to find a second reader then waited for that reader to read it then waited for them to get around to giving me their critique then waited even longer for me to work up the courage to actually read their critique… by the time all that was done, I would have lost both the interest and the will to do it.

And who the heck would be willing to read a whole 50K book for me? And then write a critique? Who would do that kind of thing for free? I would feel like I was heavily imposing upon someone just be asking them. So no, that was never an option.

Perhaps I will eventually dig up the courage to at least post a request for second readers on here. But I would do so without almost no faith that it would produce any result at all… not even a polite rejection.

That’s just how it seems to go with me. Shouting down the well. Sometimes I wonder if I am ever really here.

Anyhow, the Amazon process has my book now and will release it soonishly. I don’t know what the delay is, exactly, but I am pretty sure it must involve some human being actually laying eyes upon the thing to make sure it isn’t strings of random letters or Nazi hate speech or someone just typing PENIS over and over again.

Other than that, I am not sure why it takes like 12 hours to 48 hours to go from submitted to available. Well whatevs. It will get there when it gets there.

And when it gets there, I will, of course, make a link to it available to, frankly, everyone I can. I no longer imagine that the people I know will spread the word about things, as most people just…. don’t do that, myself included. Must be an extrovert thing. So I will also look at other ways to get the word out about it.

No idea what those might be. Maybe a table at the next Vancoufur or something. Or release a thousand balloons with the URL on them, as well as the title.

I think The Scrambled Man is a good title, don’t you? Short but intriguing.

So yeah. Took a big step towards putting my words out where people who don’t even know me can see them. I still want a traditional publishing deal some day, but for now I am happy to go the eBook route.

It might not make me rich, but at least I don’t have to convince someone to invest in me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.