The Opus is now officially published. Electronically. And I'm okay with that.
I made the mistake one day, back in March 2017, of clicking on a link on Amazon that read: "Self-Publish With Us." And well, it was all downhill from there.
I KNOW I'd pull out the ol' "Rock Opus" every few months or so, claiming I'm working on the sequel or making another attempt to publish it the old-fashioned way by sending in queries to agents and anxiously awaiting the next rejection letter. Well...here's the conclusion I came to:
I'm gonna publish this *(%&#_$*#.
The "new" way. I'd thought about this years ago by formatting the manuscript and uploading it to Lulu, as Print-On-Demand. And if I remember right, there was going to be some kind of fee for that. The biggest problem I had was cutting it down to 700 pages. (Yes, it's that long.) And I did that. Sort of. Then I got sidetracked by a dissertation for five years and that was that.
Then I bought a Kindle Fire in 2016. Not that I needed one, but for 30-some-odd dollars right after Thanksgiving, why not? This made it easier to get "freebies" and use their Lending Library. I soon learned that, sometimes, with anything free, you get what you pay for: typos, bad grammar, pages and pages of...what the crap? Does this have anything to do with the STORY? Paragraph after paragraph of college freshman playing beer pong? In a novel about a serial killer? Had the author of that romance between the Marine and the farmgirl ever even MET a Marine???
Nope, don't think so.
Some of the "freebies" you get are strictly digital, self-published novels. And yes, I'm most likely quite biased but y'know what? My stuff is as good as, if not better, than that stuff. So when I saw "Self-Publish With Us," I figured...
You know that line in "Risky Business"? Sometimes you just gotta say, "what the...."
(Now in some ways, I'm already published to Kindle. I uploaded my old PDF document right into "My Content". And there it is! I thought that was pretty cool myself.)
Now....back to reformatting. Put it all in ONE Word Document. Did some other "things" to the manuscript according to Kindle's guidelines. That wasn't too difficult, and I'm glad that they don't have page limits; they DID have megabyte limits, at least last year they did. Hmmm....
They wanted no more than 650 KB. I had 1.25. Yeee.....
Well...I got to 1.069 KB. And from 750 pgs to 652. I shaved 10 pages off just readjusting the line spacing.
I removed ALL of the song lyrics, (except for the ones I wrote myself), much to my extreme disappointment. At one point, somewhere, I read that if you only used less than "so many" words, you could get away with a reprint. That option does not exist anymore. (Damn ASCAP Police. And greedy musicians. And I can say this, become I know them.) But, to be on the safe side, the direct quotes went away, with great gnashing of teeth. You can mention a song, so I did that, and made some roundabout interpretations about what the song was talking about. I couldn't remove them completely because it's REALLY IMPORTANT TO THE STORY. And for my former readers, you KNOW how our heroic bass player thinks primarily in song lyrics. That probably cut about 500 KB out of the story right there.
My other problem was still finding a better title. I CAN steal a song title that's not too terribly obvious because they're not copyrighted (though they might be trademarked...). I looked through the Spotify playlist. I thought about Y & T's "Lipstick and Leather," but found a few other books with the same title. One was a WESTERN romance, another about a BDSM club...and one about a lesbian biker club.
Mine's an unorthodox love story, but that...wasn't going to work.
I chose Heart's "Rockin' Heaven Down." It's a song about being onstage, so yeah, that works. As a subtitle, I chose Helix's "Heavy Metal Love" because well...that's kinda what the book's about. And if it weren't for their guitarist Paul Hackman, "Jon Warren" would not exist. So there.
I changed the epilogue. A lot. Because....
The other goal I've dedicated myself to is to finish the Sequel by the time I'm 50. I've got eight months. It's finished...IN MY HEAD. Seriously. Start to finish. All I gotta do is write it down.
Like Schikaneder told Wolfgang in "Amadeus": Just write it down.
I'll deal with this later.
Once I had my manuscript ready to go, I went in search of a cover photo. I found a couple of sites that offer stock downloads, for a fee of course, but none of the images were blowing my skirt up, so to speak. They did have some guys with long hair. Wearing kilts or chain mail.
Meh...no. I know that MIGHT work but...no.
I got busy doing other things and put off the cover for another year. I opened an account on a site called Canva, found a really cool picture of Westark's stage at Railfest a few years back and started designing. I wanted to show the rock show setting and somehow feature THE ultimate hair band couple. I decided to browse around on Shutterstock and found the perfect photo. Voila!
At the time though, the only option Shutterstock had was to pay a yearly fee for a measly 10 photos. Or something like that. I just really didn't want to do that. When I looked again a month later, they offered a single project price for 5 images. Okey-doke - I'll go for that. Because I'd found the perfect picture. That's THE one I wanted and I didn't want to put this off anymore.
So, I put the first draft of the cover out there for suggestions. Feedback was positive. The stuff that bugged me about it was noticed by other people, so I knew I'd need to fix the white lettering getting lost in the stage lights. I got a PM from my original publisher in Washington and he offered some great suggestions. Once I put those in...BAM!! I had what I thought was a great cover. That met with his approval also ("Who wouldn't want to read that book!").
I was ready.
I loaded the manuscript into Kindle's previewer. And it looked great. Saved that file, went into Kindle Direct Publishing, and the upload began. It took less than 10 minutes. I had to approve some odd spellings I created, but after that, it was listed as "in review." It said it might take 72 hours to go live. So...I went to bed.
At 6:39 a.m., Friday, June 8, as I was gathering up clothes to take to the cleaners, my phone dinged with an email notification and I just HAD to read it. "Rockin' Heaven Down" was LIVE on Amazon!! Woohoo!!! It became a day of great celebration, including donuts, a pedicure, an afternoon with young Han Solo, and sushi.
I was all excited of course, then I got a little nervous. Oooh. It's out there now, where people can read it. But y'know what? I didn't do this because I wanted it to be some kind of monster bestseller or make a lot of money. (Authors make about as much as musicians, so, yeah, whatever.) I've already got a day job. This is just gravy. I don't care if anyone buys it besides family and friends. I don't even care if they like it. I don't even care if they READ it. I just wanted to see if I could do it. So I did.
Check it out!!!
Rockin' Heaven Down: Heavy Metal Love
Oh, and they FINALLY fixed my author page. That was quite the adventure.
Laura McChristian Author Page
Paperback edition coming soon!! Rock on, y'all.
