Fortunately for me, the folks in the forum didn’t stop there. As I finished up my landscape page formatting, I began looking toward the next steps, such as the all-important marketing feature that Amazon offers: the “Look Inside” feature. Without an established name, a publishing house, a brick-and-mortar store to sell at, a formal critical review to bolster my book, nor even a marketing budget, the best weapon I had were things like “Look Inside.” In the very beginning I knew I had to take advantage of this vital marketing tool. I assumed oh-so naively that there could be no barrier, given that my publishing platform was an “Amazon” company.
In anticipation of setting up my “Look Inside,” I stumbled upon a forum that explained how to get around the improper display through the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon of self-published landscape books. Basically, “Look Inside” won’t work unless you don’t mind looking at the screen with your head cocked 90° to the right. And given that the viewer averages seconds per website, this cocking-head-to-one-side workaround was not going to fly.
But I’d already done all the work to format each of 32 pages, plus a cover page, to all the exacting specifications required for printing! I tried to convince myself, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe folks would find it fun and quirky to look at the book this way...
Who was I kidding? Only myself.