(I’m crushed with work this week, but I still promised myself to write something here by today, so I’m allotting myself ten minutes, timed with a special Blog Buzzer, to complete it. Sorry in advance for incoherencies, & cetera*)

Let me confess outright that I’m one of those sad people who becomes overwhelmed when confronted by any information more complicated than 1 + 1 = 2. Straightforward cause-and-effect, with words a child can understand, that’s for me! Press this button, coffee comes out. Red light, stop. This isn’t because I’m stupid (although I probably am), but because I’m especially, pathetically vulnerable to cognitive overload: I grow frantic at the sight of large bodies of information that branch off from a central concept with all manner of linking nodes, sub-nodes, peripheral-nodes, and further multinodular semantic adjacencies and strategically encoded phrasal vagueness linked by di-transitive verbs, bridging into propositions that themselves are motored by their own central concepts that give birth, like viruses, to auxiliary bundles of exemplars, conditionals, revocations, contradictions, and exceptions, all pullulating endlessly into a dizzying nightmare that makes me want to run for the door.

Examples? An instruction booklet for assembling a children’s bicycle. Or setting up a wireless computer system. Or any explanation of the payment plan for a cellular phone.

My discomfort is compounded when the information is conveyed in small print (my eyesight is poor). When confronted by such things, my mouth becomes dry and my brain fills with foam.

That was how I first experienced the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) website. I opened the site brimming with joyful expectation, because finally I could get my goddamned novel** published. Upon opening the site and beginning to peruse its contents, my brain began to pound violently. The array of choices was so varied and confusing that I receded in terror and decided to quit right then and there.

Actually, I’m joking. Well, not about my dread of disentangling densely presented information, but about the KDP website. It’s actually quite easy to navigate and offers several options to make an already straightforward process easier. It’s chock-full of friendly numbered steps and bullet-pointed checklists.

I’ve just about run out of time today to say much more about it, but suffice it to say there are four basic steps to take to get your novel up and running on Amazon.com. And then rake in millions of dollars soon thereafter. Right.

The first step is entering your identifying information, including a bank account number if you choose, as I did, to have your royalities deposited directly. I was relieved to find that even though I live in Japan, it was no problem at all to set up payments in Japanese yen, and direct deposit to a Japanese bank. The set-up permits you (or permitted me) access to eleven markets (countries), but explicitly wouldn’t allow me access, for reasons not entirely clear to me, to Mexico and Brazil.

Tragically, my blog time-limit buzzer has buzzed and I must leave off here to teach today’s classes,work on next year’s schedule, and otherwise partake in adult responsibility activities!

Sorry, I didn’t say anything about banging my head against a stone. Maybe next time!

*at the copy machine, I hurriedly fixed at least some of the spelling errors, etc.

**see previous post about my goddamned book.