I'm Beginning To Think I Should Have Put Big Brother Onto Kindle First!

Ten weeks and counting, and still no sign of Big Brother: nothing on Amazon or any of the distribution sites like Gardners or Neilsen Bookdata.

Books published by the traditional publishers don't tend to show until a year later, but when you self-publish or use POD you expect to get what you're promised, especially when you pay a fee, however small, for distribution. Lulu.com promise a turnaround of six to eight weeks, but I have heard that twelve weeks isn't unusual; but I've never had to wait this long before. The problem is if your book is rejected for any reason you've wasted all that time waiting, and you have to make the corrections, get your proof, and start waiting all over again!

I can't do any promotion until it appears.

I emailed Lulu Support a couple of weeks ago. They apologised and said the book will appear in a 'couple of weeks'. Well, those weeks are nearly up. I've not heard that it's been rejected for any reason. Trying to think why it would be. Maybe the 174 page count is the problem (not divisible by four) but there are in fact 176 pages, I made sure of it, using a section break in my Word file (techy stuff). However, when I converted the file into PDF it took two pages away, don't know why. This is the only thing niggling me, but if it's a problem they can hurry up and say so, and they can shove extra blank pages on the end if it bothers them that much. They've done it before.

In fact the divisible by four rule isn't mentioned in the latest Lulu.com rules. It might not matter now.

So I'm beginning to think I should've loaded Big Brother up to Kindle first. People keep asking me where it is. I could've done it as a teaser and whipped it off when the paperback appeared in retail. I might do that for Goalden Girl 2 (my fifth book). In fact I won't be using Lulu for the second Goalden Girl book, I'm switching to Createspace in the future. They're cheaper and reportedly quicker, and they've finally broken into the Amazon Europe market.

Meanwhile, I'm going to work on the second Goalden Girl book. Not sure what to call it, though...