Not to complain, but there’s quite a lot to learn when you get into this stuff…

I’ve registered with SmashWords, but then I figured I needed to register with KDP too, and then I looked closely and decided I wanted the visibility that comes managing my own Kobo account too, rather than let Smashwords do it and not know exactly what’s going on.

Smashwords doesn’t have the most complex, elegant or in-depth reporting and as anyone who has ever run a new website will tell you, there’s something obsessive about monitoring the statistics on a nascent project – you feel you can get the numbers to improve if you can just stare at them hard enough.

I feel I should be allowed to stare at meaningless small numbers with the same intensity as anyone.

All this just distracts from the writing of course, which is what it says right up there, somewhere on the Smashwords blurb (they have a lot of blurb) – they free up the author to think about writing rather than channel management. Which is fair up to a point, but fiddling with per-market prices and obsessively checking the shape, font and spacing around the number “0” on your daily per-channel book sales statistics is a rite of passage for new authors, or so I’ve been led to believe. I’m thinking of printing out the zero-sales market reports and filing them with my short story rejection letters so they don’t get lonely.

The Self-Publishing Learning Curve