I first released How To Be A Jewel Diva in 2014 as a pdf e-book to sell online at my Jewel Divas MadeIt store.

At some point, I found out Amazon had the Kindle Textbook Creator and used that to make a non-flowable e-book of JD, and later used it in 2015 for Closet Confidential.

While releasing CC to my MadeIt store, I released both e-books to Amazon in October 2015.

It took two years to find out I could have both books turned into print books, and had them done in 2017, releasing them both in May.

That was the first time in print.

In 2018 I came up with the style file idea and began wanting to update the print books with them.

At the beginning of every year, 2019/2020/2021/2022, when doing my yearly planning, I mentioned wanting to update the print books with the style file. But never got around to it for various reasons. One being the relationship with my cover designer who did the books had deteriorated dramatically.

Although, at some point during those years I did have the cover updated, and did a few updates to the interior that she changed out. But again, our relationship deteriorated and I didn’t want to go back to her to do another round.

In 2023, I didn’t mention the books at all. I’m not sure why, maybe I thought I’d stop talking about them.

But in 2024 I brought it up again and finally updated the book interiors myself as I’d made it in MS Publisher. I went over and over them, updated front and back matter.

I made the decision to upload my style files to Etsy to sell. If you don’t want the book, buy the files. I had also got my act together with getting Bookfunnel prepped for the downloading of the free files. Signing up for your free copy with the link in the back of the books means signing up to my email, so I had to connect them to Mailerlite.

Rushing into 2025, I went gung-ho on getting these books done. The e-books were uploaded to Amazon with the link for the style files in the back matter.

Then the Universe sent me in the right direction to finding four companies that did what I needed to do with the interiors. I emailed and only one gave me the answer I was after. I booked them in and they did the interiors at the end of February. My new cover designer started on the covers the same week.

In the weeks leading up to it I edited the books a thousand times, thinking I had everything in order from them being on the market for ten years. But I kept finding things I wanted to change, and so kept making corrections, even on the day I had to send off the pdfs. Oi!

When I got the formatted pdfs I uploaded them to KDP and found multiple issues. The company took weeks to fix them, three weeks I waited while he was sick, then another three not hearing from them only to find out I had to do more work on the style file. Another four weeks of being ignored until I got the final formatted pdfs. I reuploaded to Amazon, and with no issues, I was able to get proofs.

I was on eggshells until I got the physical proofs from Amazon, the only place they’re for sale. They had a couple of issues which I was able to correct 99% of, but for Jewel Diva, there is one issue I could not fix and the company said I would have to go back to the MS Publisher file and correct. Except it was correct and the same layout as Closet which printed fine. So, I just had to suck up that one issue for them to be on sale and out in the world.

They have newly updated covers, spine text, and the style files are in the back of the book to use. While they may not be the professionally styled and photographed style books put out by publishers, they are mine, and they are done.