Pivoting



This past week has been rough. Beyond rough. Downright unpleasant. There were tears of frustration, feelings of failure, and numb disbelief. Making the Clean Fiction publication from scratch was crazy, making a debut issue 100 pages was ambitious, and completing a magazine of this scale mainly on my own was a massive undertaking. I had so much help along the way, but I will save my list of thank yous for another week. Right now I want to talk about the tough stuff.


I am a planner. I plan all the plans and then execute those plans to the best of my ability. I uploaded samples to Amazon months ago that would fit the magnitude of what I was trying to accomplish. This allowed me to predict pricing, formatting, and bunches of other little details in order to have the whole process to move forward as smoothly as possible. And everything did move smoothly and predictably until the time came to upload the final documents. I have done flow documents with my novel and full color documents with my children's books so a certain amount of tweaking was expected, but the amount of final formatting issues, pricing issues, and upload issues were not. To save you a long frustrating story, I will break what finally happened down to the facts. My anticipated easy reading flow document was not able to be achieved. The conversion went horribly wrong and was desperately ugly. My anticipated price of FREE was also taken off the table along with the flow document. B & N will not accept any other kind, and without their price of FREE Amazon will not price match. There were so many issues between me and the AI that only KDP Customer Service could fix my issues with their admin privilege. I have worked in the publishing world with real presses for over a decade, published multiple books on the platform, and in general know what I am doing, but this unfortunately was out of my control.


As of now the lovely Full Color Digital Edition is available for preorder at $2.99. I am working hard to get this price lowered, but for right now. This is as low as I could make it. The 8.5x11 paperback edition with premium color and white paper is available for $14.99 which gives me around $1/paperback to use in the creation of the Spring Edition 2021. This is a lot higher than I was quoted earlier this year with a similar document. I feel a bit like they were purposely leading me astray, but AI only does what AI is told to do.


So there you have it. It is not what I envisioned and not what I wanted, but I will take what I learned and apply it to the next edition with as much grace as I can muster. Honestly, I believe that the magazine that we have created is worth every penny of these prices, but I know that I made promises that I was unable to keep. And for that, I apologize, but what I will not apologize for is doing my best to meet those promises and deliver a beautiful, quality magazine full of great authors and businesses for you to enjoy. That I am certain, I have accomplished.


This Week's Community Activity:


Preorder your digital copy of Clean Fiction or order your paperback copy of Clean Fiction. Here is a secret: The paperback is ready and available for purchase NOW!!! That is right! I had it ready and published 10 days early!!! I can't wait until you get a look at how beautiful it is, and when you do, make sure you leave a review!



CleanFictionMagazine.com


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Email: CleanFictionMagazine@gmail.com

Past Newsletters/Blogs: CleanFiction.Blogspot.com or Goodreads

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