At the beginning of Covid-19, Amazon suspended the shipping of proof copies. I was reluctant to publish the paper versions of my books without physical verification, so they sat there, unpublished. Finally, almost two years after I’d formatted them, my proofs arrived.
Getting the proof copies made me truly happy, as if my books returned home after a long journey. If I have to summarize it, they brought me a lot of joy, some frustration, and a very modest income — about $300. A drop in the bucket of money invested, and it mostly came from the platform that hosted them for a year. Nothing from Amazon, of course, a little bit from D2D and Smashwords, which lists 134 sold copies, the majority of them for free during their promotional events, and about 2,400 free downloads of full books or samples.
I enrolled all three of them for their Annual Read an E-book Week Sale from March 6-12. For free, naturally.
Still, one little step before I’m officially done – I need to change the margins in “Guardian” — the recommended outside trim is too narrow — and fix the pagination on the very end. Big manuscripts are indeed difficult to maneuver. Then I’m going order a few proper copies for myself, and close this chapter.
And open a new one.
JF Kaufmann, Author 
Congratulations on the reawakening of your books from hibernation!
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Thanks! Let’s hope they’ll stay awake. 😁
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Congratulations! The books look absolutely beautiful.
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Thank you! I’m quite happy with the appearance, especially from the inside. It’s sleek and elegant. There are really no other reasons to keep them on Amazon KDP.
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Like you, I want my books to exist in print, if only as concrete evidence that I’ve created them. The formatting is a bit of a challenge, but it’s worth it in the end.
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Yes! To me, a printed copy is some sort of emotional pinnacle of the whole adventure.
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“Emotional pinnacle” describes it well!
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