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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.

Last week I discussed why as a writer you want things to go wrong in your story, and illustrated the challenges faced by the characters in Watership Down. This week, I thought I’d review how I kept throwing obstacles at Rob Moore, disrupting his ideal smooth escape to freedom.

The premise is that Rob is a wanted man by a bunch of criminals who want to silence him before he can talk to the authorities. He’s already a person of interest and is expected to be arrested soon. His goal is to flee the country, but in order to do so, he must first stop at his father’s to get something he’ll need before going into exile.

I throw two challenges at Rob right off the bat after he gets what he came for. The first is that the suitcase he was after is a lot heavier than he expected, and the second is that his new ride is farther down the street than the car he rode to his father’s.

I don’t let up though. Rob is already grumbling that it took longer than he’d expected to get the suitcase, hinting at a schedule he needs to keep to. Before he can reach his car, a man starts screaming from a neighboring townhouse. Because Rob is in the process of fleeing the country, he doesn’t want to be spotted outside his home, where he is still believed to be, and spends the rest of the trek to the new ride in fear that he’ll be spotted. As he’s approaching the new vehicle, one of the scoundrels that are after him impedes his path, training a gun on him.

All of this happens in Chapter 2, which is a whopping 2 pages, a chapter whose sole purpose is as follows:

Rob exits Preston’s townhouse carrying a heavy briefcase until he is stopped by gunpoint.

It’s just one event that needs to happen to set up the events in the following chapters, but instead of keeping it dry like the one sentence synopsis I just gave, I try to make it fraught with tension (Rob not wanting to be spotted), throwing hurdles at him during his escape (heavy suitcase, farther distance to travel out in the open) and the sense of a countdown (grumbling that it took too long) until his life is put in danger (being held at gunpoint). All of this is done to spice up the two pages and keep it engaging for the reader.

You tell me, did it work?

Johan hadn’t been so sure he wanted the man to get into the back of his cab. The man had been swaying terribly, even though there wasn’t even the faintest hint of a breeze, and had to steady himself for dear life against his mountain of luggage.

American, Johan thought, when he stared at the cowboy hat the man was wearing.

Gawking at the cowboy hat had been the mistake. The man had noticed him eyeing it and had taken that as his cue to crawl into the backseat, expecting Johan to fetch his bags and cram them into his miniscule trunk.

After tending to the drunk’s bags, Johan settled back behind the wheel only to notice that the man in the cowboy hat was stretched out across the backseat, and was snoring. Johan shouted to get his attention, but it wasn’t until he blew his horn that he got the man to wake up.

It was only after the man offered apologies in Swedish that Johan accepted that he wasn’t American. And it wasn’t until after the man reluctantly sat up, and his cowboy hat fell off, that Johan realized he recognized him.

The drunk’s eyes may have had a glassy look to them, and Johan had never envisioned seeing him with a waterfall of drill spilling down his chin, but his passenger was unmistakably Axel Forsberg.

The man was a celebrity in Sweden. An inspiration to everyone with an entrepreneurial mindset. He’d attained great heights, running the arms company that the U.S. Government renewed contract after contract with to supply the many branches of their armed forces.

Partnering up with Axel Forsberg was like receiving Midas’ touch. Rivaling companies were willing to slit each other’s throats for the chance to attain exclusivity with him. Five years ago, Sweden’s business world marveled at how a startup experienced a meteoric rise from operating out of the founder’s garage to becoming a powerhouse solely off of the deal with Forsberg to supply all his offices in Europe with whatever office supplies they needed.

“Mr. Forsberg,” Johan said, cheerily.  “It’s an honor to have you in my cab.” He still thought his passenger might vomit all over his backseat, but now he almost welcomed it.

If Axel Forsberg ruined the interior of his car, he might be more agreeable to a business partnership as a way of making up for his actions.

“It’s an honor to be in your cab,” Axel said as he picked up his hat and placed it over his eyes, still attempting to get some sleep.

“If I may say so, sir, while I hope this isn’t the last time I can escort you to your destination, I do hope this is the only time I can provide such a service with such a, well, modest means of transportation.”

Johan had been polishing a plan for years to start up his own business. In essence, it would be a cab company, but with a more luxurious feel, catering to wealthy businessmen who wanted to arrive at meetings in style. He’d have a few limousines as well, and hike up the rate to rent them out, but only to steer his customers towards the town cars he would have an easier time financing as he got his business up and running.

Over the past two years, his wife had grown weary of listening to him expound on hos successful the company he was refusing to start would eventually be. He was practically giddy fantasizing about breaking the news that he had struck a deal with THE Axel Forsberg.

“Ah, an entrepreneur,” Axel said, in a tone that was one step above drowsy.

“Yes sir,” Johan said, merrily, believing that they were hitting it off.

“I like talking to entrepreneurs,” Axel said, shifting in the back seat, resting his head against the window. “I love hearing their stories. Tell me, do you have people who don’t believe in you. Who only tell you to quit because all you’ll do is fail?”

“Yes sir,” Johan said, though he withheld sharing that the person who voiced the most doubts was his wife.

My god, he’s asking questions! We’re really delving deep. I might actually strike a deal with him before the end of the trip.

Axel seemed to snore, even though he was awake and talking. “Me too,” he said with a yawn. “Every day I wake up, I remind myself about all the ways I was ‘bound to fail’ if I returned to America.”

“Does it motivate you to wake up every day and prove them wrong?” Johan asked. He waited for the longest time for a response, eyeing his rearview mirror to see if his passenger had fallen asleep. He was about to pose the question again when Axel finally replied.

“It motivates me to keep coming back here. I never miss the chance to look my father in the eye and tell him he was wrong.”