I really must learn to read directions. Uploaded my first e-book to Amazon two weeks ago. A snap. Uploaded the same mss. to smashwords.com on Friday. A breeze. Except for the 3,818 people uploading ahead of me! Spent much of the day monitoring the smashwords auto-refresh page, calculating if they upload books at the rate of 100 per hour mine should be uploaded sometime Saturday.
The Smashword’s “meatgrinder” (their automatic uploading device) must have had to digest a massive tome because I stayed at 3,555 in the upload line for most of Friday evening. Saturday, somewhere in the two thousands. Sunday, voila, an email from Smashwords – “Congratulations! You have successfully uploaded ‘The River Within’. But don’t celebrate yet, author, you still have to do a few more things.”
I scanned the email and thought, okay, I’ll get to them Tuesday. This morning I go to my Dashboard and check the book’s status to see if it has passed the approved formatting requirements and made it into the Premium Distribution catalogue (those are the big guys, like iPad and Nook). Dashboard says “Pending Approval”.
All day I’m checking the status. All day it’s “Pending Approval”. All day I’m fretting about what I’ve done wrong and how can I correct it. Finally I decide to check the FAQs and see how long the approval process takes. “It typically takes seven days, give or take a couple days…”
Hence the need to learn to read directions!