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Nils observed his son was following the same pattern he’d always exhibited when coming home. Axel had pushed past him when he’d opened the front door for his son, and settled on a couch in the living room without a word, waiting for his father to join him.

While Axel did this every year, the callousness of his actions seemed to deepen with each passing year. His son arrived in a greater drunken stupor, and his agitation when he flippantly gestured with a wave of his hand for his father to start talking was more apparent than ever. In a way, it made Nils reflect back fondly on all of Axel’s prior visits, when it oddly felt like Axel at least tolerated returning home.

“We’ll need more this year,” Nils said humbly, earning a sharp glare from his son. Nils couldn’t tell if it was because he dared to ask, or if it was because the amount of neediness in his voice wasn’t to his son’s liking.

“The medication your mother needs to take,” he quickly elaborated, “it, well…my unemployment checks aren’t enough to cover them.”

“Why don’t you get your job back at the factory?” Axel snarled as he rubbed furiously at his temple.

“The plant closed down,” Nils reminded his son. He had a sneaking suspicion Axel knew this, just like he had a sneaking suspicion that Axel had been the one who acquired the plant seven years ago just to lay everyone in it off and shutter its doors.

“So go find another plant or warehouse to work in.”

“I’ve tried,” Nils cried, desperately. “They all think I’m too old to do the work.”

Axel snorted. “Seems like it’s a bad idea trying to always rely on a company to give you steady work instead of creating one yourself.”

Nils clamped his mouth shut. There it was. Axel’s annual lesson he was teaching his father. He appreciated that his son had at least gotten to it quickly this year, faster than any year prior. Perhaps it was a sign that Axel was finally getting tired of delivering his annual tutelage of what happened when you didn’t believe in him. Perhaps it was a sign Axel was finally ready to forgive him and move on.

Nils hoped so.

“How much more did you need?” Axel barked. Nils gave an amount, and Axel quickly stated he would only be granting him half. Nils feigned like this would create a hardship, but this was one of Axel’s lessons that he’d learned: Nils had been asking for over double and sometimes triple what he really needed, knowing Axel would never give him the full amount.

“You’re not staying?” Nils asked when Axel rose unsteadily from the couch and began to stagger for the door. He glanced out the window to see his son’s cab was still idly in front of his yard.

“I’ve got an amazing room at a five star hotel waiting for me. Why would I stay here?” His son didn’t react to the stifled sob that came from the kitchen.

“Please,” Nils said, grabbing his son’s shoulder to stop him from leaving. Axel wrenched himself free of Nils’ grasp, then turned on him, the fury in his eyes accentuated by how bloodshot they were.

“I’ve amended your allowance,” Axel snarled. “You’ll now only receive a quarter of what you’ve asked for this year.”

“Please,” Nils persisted. “If you want to punish me, fine, but don’t punish your mother. Please. Her health is failing. Bring our granddaughter here, so that at least your mother can see her. Just once.”

Axel opened the front door, then turned to face his father one last time.

“I told you, promised you, that you both would never see your grandchild as long as you were alive. She’ll never know who you are. Do you not get how this arrangement works? I will never grant you even the smallest of victories.”

And with that, he shut the door behind him, and his visit was over.

After watching countless YouTube videos and listening to hours of podcasts offering advice on how to build an author platform, I decided that an author website was necessary. I’d never made a website before, but there was a series of YouTube videos that broke the process down step by step that I felt I could use as a guideline for what to do.

Following the first of the three videos was smooth sailing. It was all about paying for the website, entering in your payment information, and selecting the website package that fit your needs. I was able to follow along with the instructor.

Then…came the second video.

When it came time to actually start formatting the aesthetic of my website, I noticed that the website I was looking at looked slightly different from what the YouTuber was navigating through. This is because companies will constantly update the look and functionality of their website. The goal is to make it a smoother, easier experience for the user. But anyone with a Facebook account knows that that’s not always the case when they make these changes.

Suddenly, the whole interface looks different, and functions that you’ve gotten used to finding in certain places and have accepted as the most logical place for them now are nowhere to be found. Or are cut entirely, even though you may have found them to be some of the most useful applications.

The YouTube videos I was watching weren’t even that old. They had just been published 6 months before I had ventured into making my own website. Sure, they weren’t recently uploaded, but it’s not like I was attempting to follow instructions that were made five years ago and wondering why they were out of date.

Instead of getting the website done in an afternoon or so, as the videos convinced me it might be possible to do, this ended up taking multiple sessions of guess work, with me going “This link sounds like it could be what I’m looking for, let me see….no, that’s not it either. Hmmmmmm.”

This may seem like it was a minor inconvenience that only held me back a couple days, and in a way, that’s true. But in addition to trying to set up this website, I was also working on everything else I needed to do to bring Dig Down to market, was still in the process of working with the editor to polish Dig Down, and was outlining and writing another project that I hoped I’d be able to publish within a year after my first novel.

And these were just the writing goals I had at the time. There was still everything else I had going on in my life that I couldn’t just put on hold to build a website. I usually allotted time on Sundays to work solely on the website, so while it was only a couple of days of trial and error before I figured out how the new interface operated, those couple of days stretched out over an entire month.

Henrik looked up as he was tending to his hedges as the taxicab pulled up in front of the Forsberg’s house. As soon as he saw it idly in front of their driveway, he knew who had come to pay them a visit. People in this neighborhood seldom moved out once they settled in. It got so Henrik could tell what time of the week, month, or even year, not only when someone might receive a house guest, but who that guest might be.

Has it been a year already?

It had surprised him when Axel had come back home the first time. He’d been neighbors with the Forsberg’s long enough to know the father and the boy had not gotten along. Nils had always ridden his son to exhibit a strong work ethic, and the boy always argued that he had bigger dreams than just being a slave to a paycheck.

The worst episode of the bickering between the two of them had come when Axel was applying for colleges in America as a foreign exchange student to study business. Nils, in his classic well-meaning, but unsupportive manner, had tried to persuade Axel to stay in Sweden, to get a job and learn how a business operates with on-the-job training. Axel had, in Henrik’s opinion, correctly accused his father of opposing his plans to go to America out of fear over potentially having to foot the bill if Axel failed.

Nils almost immediately concerned it. Henrik could still hear him screaming “Of course I’m worried you’ll fail! You don’t even know the language. How can I think about anything but failure?”

But Axel had showed him. In the months leading up to flying to America, he approached learning English with such tenacity, that had it not been for the accent, Henrik would’ve believed the boy had been born and raised in America.

When Axel got on the plane, Henrik had believed that was the last time he ever saw the boy. Henrik had heard a fair amount of shouting at the mother for never sticking up for him. Much to his surprise, the boy, now a man, made an annual pilgrimage back home to visit his folks. It was a trip made only once a year, but it was still more than Henrik had ever expected.

Henrik always got the report from Ebba after her son came and went. In those first years, Axel had come home to boast about the stellar grades he’d received in college. Then about the company he was starting with some friends of his from the university. Now, it was always about how profitable that company had become. Henrik had been retired for over a decade, but he understood that whatever Axel was doing, he’d grown very successful.

In front of the Forsberg’s lawn, Axel needed to prop himself up against the side of the cab to stay on his feet. Even from this distance, Henrik could tell this was the most intoxicated Axel had ever been arriving at his parent’s doorstep.

“He must still hate the man,” Henrik muttered aloud, even though there was no one nearby to hear him. “He must still despise him if it requires more and more alcohol to stomach paying him a visit.”

Henrik shook off the thought. It was pure foolishness to believe that. Axel’s business was successful enough that he had a built-in excuse to never return home if he didn’t want to. He could always claim the company demanded too much of his attention.

No. Someone like Axel would never return home against his will. I don’t believe he does anything he doesn’t want to do. Which can only mean one thing.

There’s something about this trip that he relishes enough to keep making them.

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.

Ebba scrambled back and forth across the house, tidying up, making sure everything was in its right place. No spec of dust was safe from her meticulous eyes, no photo frame dared to tilt beyond a perfect ninety degree angle.

Nils nearly cowered when she rounded a corner and burst in through the kitchen. She had already laid into him twice about helping her make the place look immaculate, and he wasn’t prepared to face her wrath a third time this morning.

“What are you doing?” she demanded more than asked.

“Nothing,” he murmured, stepping back from her. “Thought I might grab something to snack—”

“Snack? Snack?” she asked, as if he were the raving lunatic. “I just went through the house making sure this place is spotless, and you want to leave a trail of crumbs everywhere?”

“Ebba, I’m starving,” Nils protested. “He’s already two—”

“Ugh, this attitude is the reason he barely visits at all!” she practically screamed at him, even though it wasn’t true.

Her husband had become extremely docile over the past decade. He was a shadow of the man she had married nearly five decades ago, strong headed but strong willed as well, there had been a sureness to him that had been so easy to fall for when she’d been the same age her granddaughter is now.

The thought of her granddaughter caused her to come up short of breath. She eyed Nils with a look of betrayal. Her eyes accused him of wanting to know where her husband had gone, and why he’d been replaced with this terrified dreck before him.

But she knew why. They both did.

“He’ll be here,” she rasped. “Go sit in the living room and turn on the news if you want to take your mind off your belly. And don’t you dare make a mess in there.”

Her eyes trailed him as he exited the room sulking. She turned back to her stove where she was keeping the lunch she prepared at a simmer, awaiting his arrival.

Ebba had grown used to him arriving late. He’d done so ever since his company started its contractor work with the U.S. At first, she’d bought the guise he was selling that something always came up that caused him to get on a later flight. Now, she knew he always delayed his arrival on purpose.

Oh please, please forgive us. Please finally forgive us.

Despite always being fashionably late when he came home, she didn’t dare start cooking her meals later to compensate. Ebba didn’t want to risk the one time she got a late start on having a home cooked meal prepared for him be the one time her son actually showed some punctuality. She was already being punished because of what her husband had done almost three decades ago. Ebba didn’t want to risk finding out what her Axel would retaliate with if she disappointed him.

She looked up at the sound of a car door slamming, them scurried through the window. A bolt of excitement charged through her body.

“He’s here!” she called to Nils. She watched as two doors opened, and for a moment, got her hopes up.

“Is he…alone?” Nils asked.

Ebba did her best to fight back the frown, and the tears, when she saw the second person to emerge from the car was the cab driver. Nils didn’t need to wait for her to reply. The delayed response was all he needed to know.

Their granddaughter hadn’t made the trip as well.

While you want a lot of things to go wrong in your story, ideally, you want it to be smooth sailing when you’re bringing your book, especially your first book, to market. You’re putting something out into the world, and you want everything to go perfect so the reader has an enjoyable experience and wants to come back for more.

Publishing Dig Down was not an easy journey. You may ask what could possibly go wrong when self-publishing a book on a website that tries to make it’s directions as smooth and user friendly as possible.

Sometimes, it felt like everything could go wrong.

I went through a lot of trials and tribulations to bring Dig Down to market. Some of them were unavoidable. This is one of them.

For starters, the paperback and e-book are actually 2 different formats of the same story. If you have a paperback copy of Dig Down, you’ll notice that a new chapter doesn’t begin on the following page, but will start right on the same page that the prior chapter ended, provided there is enough room. This is the intended reading experience. It’s a short book, with mostly short chapters, it seemed like a waste of paper to just start each chapter on a new page, and by having one chapter lead into the next on the same page, I was hoping to creating a flow that would get the reader to keep reading.

I tried to do this with the e-book. But every time I skimmed through the layout of how the pages would look on an e-reader, it seemed EVERY chapter would end at the bottom of a page, creating a situation where only the chapter number would fit on the page, maybe the timestamp as well, but the chapter itself wouldn’t start until the next page, which just looked awful and unprofessional.

What was worse was that when I first switched the format so that a new chapter would begin on a new page, I ran into the reverse problem. Now there were a handful of chapters that would end with orphans. What that means is a chapter would end with only a few words, (and in one case, only one word), spilling onto a brand new page only to end the chapter, leaving the rest of the page blank because now the new chapter would start on its own brand new page. This also looked awful and unprofessional, in a completely new way.

Time and again, I kept trying to fix the pages so that it would look good until I realized something. If you have a kindle or e-reader, you may already be aware of my mistake. For e-readers, people can change aspects of the book to suit their preferences. For instance, some people may have poor eyesight, and will enlarge the text.

If they had control over the way they wanted the book displayed, it meant I didn’t have to keep raking myself over the coals trying to get it just right, because if someone didn’t like the way it was presented, they could just change the format to something they did. I’d been reading a book using the kindle app on my phone and couldn’t tell you where on the page the text ended before a new chapter began, so I doubted anyone would be able to tell that I had a few words carryover onto a new page before the chapter ended.

So, I just made sure each chapter started on a fresh page, regardless of where the prior chapter ended, and published. It wasn’t an attitude of “This is the reader’s problem now” because with the reader having complete control of the presentation once they bought the book, it wasn’t a problem at all.

If I were to try to put a positive spin on it, I’d say that I’d at least learned not to spend so much energy on making sure the e-book’s format was perfect since anyone could just go in and change things to their liking after the fact. I just don’t think it was worth the hours I spent learning that lesson.