More on Self Publishing

Let's discuss this E business for a minute...call me crazy, but I have such a hard time deciding HOW to write this out. Do I go the way of Apple and the iPhone, iPad, iPod?? Making it eBook, ePublishing, eMarket...

Or do we hyphen the darn words? E-books, E-publisher... etc.

Perhaps it's neither and I should just write it like it's a word, epublishing. 

When it comes right down to it, I get confused! hahaha. What can I say? I like to follow the rules and when the rules aren't clear, my world is out of sorts. :D Before I move on to Self Publishing, I have to say there are a few top epublishers that I am willing to sub to. As a matter of fact, I have two submissions out right now. Keep your fingers crossed for me!! :D

Self Publishing: And how I've been convinced it's a worthwhile effort

Example. It's thrilling to hear the success stories. Even knowing the chances of multi-thousand dollar success [notice how I'm too shy to actually use the word million], I have friends who sell a decent amount and are able to supplement an income. Dreams are of stardom, success, fame... 

Goals, sometimes they're merely making a few extra dollars every month so you can go out to dinner as a family. Ya know? 

So that's about the money... making your hobby pay. 

As the industry has changed, so has our method of finding and discovering books. The internet opened all the doors. I'm serious! You just have to Google a word, put a comma, and add fiction to it...and voila! A list of books and the links to buy them. Amazon, BN, and a number of smaller booksellers are leaving the market open to its customers. Which is why [or one of the reasons why] self publishing is having so much success. It's one of the reasons I've [gone to the dark side] and started preparing one of my manuscripts for publication. I'm lucky because I belong to a crit group. So my work not only has to satisfy ME, but it goes through at least one round of edits with my crit partners. I have the luxury of those crit partners or friends and aquaintances reading through it again.... and then I hire an editor who will hopefully catch even more mistakes. Finally, I'll have one hoorah with another beta reader [or two]. 

The concern with self publishing is about flooding the market with a less than quality product. Any Tom, Dick or Harriet can "write" a book and [try to]sell it. And I've read some pretty, pretty, pretty crappy books... it's a given. I can say, with confidence that the crap coming from the SP shelf is crappier than the crap off the NYP shelf. The bottom line, though...is that they both have crap. Only you're going to pay alot more for the NYP crap. Recently, I bought a self pubbed book for 99cents. My first surprise was the length... 900 pages. 900!! I'm sorry, but if you need 900 pages to finish a romance story, you probably need two books [or even three]. And it was promotioned as romance, but I found as I read that it wasn't really. It was more inspirational/women's literature... with way too many peculiarities. 

....whoa!! I have to stop myself. It's easy to get on that train and go off on a tangent. My point is 99cents is worth the lesson in how NOT to write a story! 99cents does not kill my budget. And I learn how to be more selective in my choices. I learn what to look for...cover art, blurbs, sample chapters, webpages-does the author have one? do they have other books out? is the page professional looking? 

OH!, do they thank their family or do they thank their wonderful, competent editor who helped them get to where they are?  haha. 

Like with epublishing, self publication and the digital era, on the whole, allows us to publish our smaller works. Gone are the days when an author had to write a number of short stories before being published. People love getting short stories! We live in a busy world, saturated with instant gratification. There's nothing more satisfying than reading an entire story in one sitting...on your ereader, while you wait for your oil to be changed.

I'm going to stop there... probably could have stopped sooner, so many words! How unlike me. :D 

Next post on self publishing, I'll go through the steps I've taken to become self published. 

Have a great weekend!!

With Love,

Bethanne