Chore Day, April 11, 2020: Cooking Bean Burgers and Looking for My Book on Amazon

After I cooked up a batch of bean burgers for the boys, I went to Amazon to check out my book. I’ve had only a handful of sales, most of them to myself, but I like to look at my Amazon page now and then to get a renewed sense of accomplishment. But today, when I went to get my ego boost, I saw that Amazon no long sells my $8.99 book. The book is listed, but Amazon doesn’t actually sell it any more. It’s been booted from the store. But, Amazon does redirect customers to another seller who will order the book from Ingramspark for $4.99 and sell it for $16.61. Fortunately, Barnes and Noble is a little more friendly. The book is still for sale there for $8.99.

Another Unfortunate Event, Which Means Another Lesson Learned

Today’s fiasco happened like this. My book cover image is 8k by 4k. It’s 280MB sitting on my iPad. I don’t have a backup. That’s just insane. Last week I wanted to grab just a section of the image for a blog post. I cropped the image down to show only the title text. I exported the Procreate file as a jpeg. The killer error occurred when I forgot to undo the crop. Once I closed the file there was no way to restore the original file.

Today I opened my cover image to place it into my Ingramspark cover page template. That’s when I realized that only the cropped image existed. My original cover image, with all of its layers, is officially gone forever. I’ve spent hours trying to recreate it using bits and pieces of jpeg images, png images, and even some psd images. It’s turned into a Frankenstein monster, and I still have work to do.

But, I’m not going to work on this any more, at least for today. It’s now family time, and I’m looking forward to having a snack.

Today’s lesson is: Don’t get cocky; don’t get lazy; just back everything up…all the time.