Blowing a trumpet, my own! 13th October 2010.

Well, going to have to do it, and in praise of our aggregator too.

Last week, I uploaded all 91 of our existing books (as it was when I started putting them together, we’ve released 4 since then which will go in the next tranche) to our aggregator. Each book in 4 formats, plus a resized cover plus a huge metadata spreadsheet – whose format I am not allowed to divulge under a non-disclosure agreement.

That was exactly one week ago.

They told me it would take up to 21 working days to accomplish the upload process – note that is 21 working days not ordinary days, and don’t ask why they used 21 and not 20.

An hour and twenty minutes ago, I got the e-mail. All the books have uploaded, perfectly, all versions, all books. First time as well.

Sorry, that is definitely worth a trumpet fanfare. I honestly expected they would want some changes, but no, they seem to be happy with it, no miss-named files, faults, errors, mistakes or omissions reported.

Their back office system, looked impenetrable to begin with, but is clearly quite swish and sophisticated, I’ve just spent the last hour scanning through the catalogue and I can’t see anything wrong anywhere.

I’m utterly amazed. Things like this don’t happen to me, I always make some error, or the process aborts or takes forever. It just doesn’t go right, and in less than a third of the time, not for me, not ever!

Life’s pessimist must now crank out a tune. Now where did I put that trumpet?