In the last week, I've been asking myself just that question..."What am I doing?"—said with a groan and a weary heart. That's because I'm lost in what feels like an endless process of reformatting the 44 titles I uploaded to Smashwords and Amazon in 2013-2015.
They were OK, though I've learnt a lot about layout and formatting since then, and have altered spacing and font size to make the page look more attractive...fun, huh? To add to the tedium, many of the hyperlinks disappeared, the ones that allow Kindle users to click on a chapter number in the table of contents to jump to the right place in the book. To find if they work means clicking on each and every one, replacing those that are missing. I feel like a robot, not a writer.
This is the side of writing that's never mentioned or even thought about, when someone imagines themselves penning a book. I'm doing it as part of my 2019 campaign of self-promotion, making my existing self-published books look as good as possible.
What I'd rather be doing is writing new stories, which is joyful to me, like seeing freshly born lambs gambol around a field. Re-formatting eBooks feels more like cleaning up their droppings!
The only good thing about this onerous task is, that I'll turn to completing my income tax return online and query letters to cloth-eared literary agents with glee!