The shift ended at eleven. I was home by midnight. I should have slept.
Instead I opened the laptop and went back to Amazon.
The manuscript is finished. The cover is finished. What is left is not writing. It is the part nobody told me about — the part that has nothing to do with sentences.
KDP — Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — asks you to fill in three boxes before you can publish.
The first is the price.
The second is the keywords — seven slots, each up to fifty characters.
The third is the categories — three of them, picked from a list of hundreds.
That is what I was looking at when I noticed it was four in the morning.
I do not know what to charge for the book. I sat with the Kindle price dropdown for a long time. $4.99. $5.99. $6.99. $7.99. A dollar between each one. None of them obviously right. Pick too low and people may think it is cheap. Pick too high and they may not click. There is no formula. There is no one who tells you.
I do not know what keywords readers will type. There is no way to know. I sat there typing phrases, then deleting them, then typing them again. By four in the morning these were the seven that stayed:
shift worker self help
bored at work
life after dream job
building wealth working class
immigrant memoir Canada
work life balance memoir
honest career advice no fluff
Seven slots filled. Each one a small guess about who might be searching.
The categories are worse. There are hundreds of them, nested inside each other. I picked three. Biographies and Memoirs. Self-Help. Business and Money — Job Hunting and Careers — Job Hunting. Each one a slightly different guess at what kind of book I had written.
It is a strange thing to choose how a stranger finds you.
I wrote the book. The harder part is the things I did not know would be part of it — the formatting, the cover dimensions, the trim size, the bleed, the back cover blurb, the metadata, the categories, the keywords, the price.
None of this is writing. All of it has to be done.
At four in the morning I picked numbers. I picked words. I clicked Save.
I do not know if I picked the right ones. I do not know if anyone will find the book. The book goes live on May 25 either way.