Another obstacle I faced when trying to publish Dig Down was trying to list it on Apple’s iBooks program. Dig Down is only listed on the Amazon KDP Select program now, but being a first time author, I wanted to list it on every platform I could because I didn’t know where the book would sell the most and I didn’t want to restrict my options to just Amazon.
Although they are the biggest sellers of e-books, I was concerned that another platform might be able to reach more readers. Since Amazon is the biggest player in this space, most authors will flock to list their book on their site, which means there’s a greater chance to get lost in the sea of new content and new voices being published every day. By listing Dig Down on as many platforms as I could, I felt I’d be increasing my exposure, and it would be more likely that my book would get noticed.
Unfortunately, this is one of the hurdles in the publishing process I was unable to clear, although I don’t think this was my fault. I think this one lands solely on the shoulders of Apple.
To give you a frame of reference, Amazon’s process for self-publishing is broken down into 3 steps. The steps can become very detailed, but they’re kept simple enough while still covering all the bases you’ll need to in order to self-publish and sell a book online. You go onto Amazon’s site and click the link at the bottom to self-publish and list your book on Amazon. You upload your manuscript and cover art onto their site, pick a launch date, fill out a form describing the book so that the site can help you reach interested readers, set what regions you want to sell the book in, and the price. Seems pretty simple right? Seems like it’s all common sense when it’s laid out like this for you?
Now let’s take a look at Apple’s process.
First off, you don’t even go onto their site for selling iBooks. You have to download a new app just to start the process. Then, you upload your cover art and manuscript into that. Remember last week when I was talking about how most books have their new chapters start on a new page, and how I felt having the new chapters start on the same page that the prior chapters ended felt more appropriate for Dig Down? Yeah, well iBooks formatted the manuscript different, meaning that the chapter layout looked downright awful. Some pages would have the chapter number at the bottom of the page, and then the timestamp on the top of the next page. I eventually had to remove the file I had uploaded and copy and paste every single chapter into the app separately.
Once that was done, you then signed into the iTunes store and followed their link to self-publish. Every time I tried to enlist in the program, I got an error message and was bounced back to the start screen. After multiple times coming back to it after restarting my computer, or just giving it a little time before trying it again, I gave up on the process.
I know it seems like I was almost there, but what I remember from reading about the process, there was another program, possibly another app, I was going to have to download to set up my payment information. The whole system they had in place just felt so unintuitive. Amazon had constructed a system in which everything was there for you in one place. With Apple, it was like, okay, don’t go to the actual site where your book will be listed, download this app first, then, yeah, forget that Amazon offers an upload process where they do all the heavy lifting for you, go through and reformat your whole book yourself, then when you’re done with that, go to this other place to set up your account and your payment information.
I’m sure we’ve all had an experience with a small company trying to compete with the big boys where the process they have a place is such a hassle compared to the company that’s #1 in that space. I feel like you can wrap your head around the struggle when it’s a mom and pop company because they don’t have the means to put an infrastructure in place like an Amazon or a Wal-Mart.
But this was Apple. A multi-billion dollar company. There’s no way they could look at their process and what Amazon has in place and go “Yeah, ours is just as good, no room for improvement on our end.”
Needless to say, I’m not going to attempt to list any future books with them.