Incarnation
How do I get this book out of me?
I have gotten as far as receiving a proof from Amazon of the paperback version of Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces. They did a great job on the matte finish cover. However, upon inspecting the interior, it turned out there are still a few errors I need to correct before I finally release the paperback. Rather than deal with the errors late tonight, I might as well share a bit about what has helped me in my self-publishing process to date.
The Jupiter in Aries transit in late 2022 and early 2023 was great for giving me the confidence to impulsively expand into self-publishing. Aries happens to be my 7th House of Relationships, so I was blessed with excellent collaborators who made the essay anthology possible.
I am also glad that Jupiter will not be in Aries again until 2034, because the rush for speed was not ideal for quality. Fortunately, Aries is followed by consistent Taurus, and the current Jupiter in Taurus transit has given me opportunities to improve the book’s quality. In general, I would say self-publishing a book is more doable than you might think but not as easy as Amazon makes it sound.
If your book does not have footnotes or other complicated features, you can use the same file that you used for the e-book to generate a paperback version through Kindle Direct Publishing. Unfortunately, I love footnotes, so that wasn’t an option for me — I was going to have to supply my own PDF interior file.
I used a free template offered by Kindlepreneur to build the interior of the paperback book. Amazon also offers free book interior templates, but the Kindlepreneur templates are much better designed. I then wound up making some changes to the Kindlepreneur template’s pre-defined heading and body text styles in Microsoft Word. What the template did for me that I would have struggled to do for myself had to do with margins, which are different on even and odd pages to allow space for the binding.
Still, the whole project was pretty much at the upper end of my computer skill range. Kindlepreneur also sells paid software for authors who would like additional assistance with turning their written work into formatted books.
How do I get this book out of me?
I subscribe to Deborah Houlding’s Skyscript Newsletter and totally resonated with her comment describing technical difficulties and other problems that delayed the release of a recent newsletter issue as “labour pains.” I’ve never been pregnant myself, but I can definitely see the analogy.
(I made the graphic above during my fiction writing days; it’s now available as a sticker on Redbubble.)
Publishing the original e-book version of Impossible Dreams in March 2023 was not too scary. It felt similar to writing for a website, where content can be updated as needed.
A book on paper can’t be changed once it’s printed, though. That was more intimidating. As described in an October 2023 Substack post, I started digging deeper into consistency in capitalization as I worked on the paperback version. I subsequently overturned that post’s ruling on the capitalization of “zodiac,” after going through various books and publications to see what was more commonly used.
Eventually, though, I had to get my book out of me!
During November 2023, I did some Google searches about how to induce labor, thinking there might be something to drawing out the metaphor further. One common suggestion was raspberry leaf tea. I found some at a small neighborhood grocery store, prominently labeled “Pregnancy Tea.” With that in hand, I then discovered the store’s Friday afternoon wine tasting on my way to the checkout, and I enthusiastically partook. To a spectator who didn’t know what was going on, that might have looked really bad!
I eventually bought the tea and drank some, but I don’t think it really did anything.
A funny way to put book errors in perspective
I am not sure what is going on these days at X, formerly known as Twitter, but my feed there now gets clogged with posts from many people I never signed up to follow. The Sunday after I attended the wine tasting, I received a post from notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke. I never signed up to follow him, but I legitimately follow some X accounts related to cryptocurrencies, and Icke was going to be speaking with the promoters of an obscure altcoin concerning reptilians, so perhaps that was the common thread.
In general, I don’t see rhetoric involving lizard people as helpful or likely to be founded in reality. However, I was very stressed out and needed a good laugh, so I went ahead and listened to Icke’s live broadcast.
Icke wound up delivering exactly the message I needed to hear as he relayed a story from a reader of one of his books. This woman had Icke’s book on her bedroom shelf, and her boyfriend became agitated upon seeing the book there. He was offended by the idea of her reading books about reptilians. The woman and her boyfriend then became sexually intimate, and the boyfriend sprouted a tail during the encounter. Finally, he stood up from the bed in full reptilian form himself and departed, never to be seen again.
Well, here I am worrying because maybe I can’t guarantee my book will have every single hyphen and capitalization completely correct, but apparently there are much bigger things that can go wrong with books!
I think I can pretty well guarantee that your significant other will not turn into a lizard if you keep a copy of Impossible Dreams on your nightstand. If anything like that does happen, please contact the publisher, which is me, for a full refund. Include proof of purchase and, if possible, any lizard scales that were shed.
You wouldn’t want your significant other turning into a lizard, though — they might leave you for a sock!
(Click on the Instagram lizard picture — it goes to a whole video of the lizard chasing the sock.)
Point being, you should buy my book rather than his. I will let you know when the paperback version and updated e-book version finally come up on Amazon so you can do so soon!