Day 3.1: Five Reasons to Consider Self-Publishing

As I mentioned near the beginning of this blog, I'm a writer who would like to remain a writer. I want to be able to work on a good novel all day long every day and not have work get in the way. I also want to have some means of getting an income. Hence, this blog. I am out to explore the possibilities!

Today's topic is self-publishing. As a former English major, I know that self-publishing is largely still frowned upon in serious writing communities. There aren't any quality requirements for publishing your writing yourself, it's expensive and a lot of hard work for little acclaim. However, I've noticed that much of the same could be said of published books. I've seen horribly written published books, books that looked bad on the inside and out. Getting a book published professionally doesn't seem to depend so much on being a good writer as it does on being in the right place at the right time and having the right editor getting his hands on your manuscript. It's a hard world out there, and even if you do get successfully published, you must cater to the publisher's every whim and forfeit the rights of your own book. If it's a small publishing company, it will probably give a higher priority to your book, but most bookstores will likely not bother carrying it. If it's a huge and well respected publishing company, your book will probably be a the bottom of their priorities. It's time for a different strategy.

When I first decided to self publish a book, I was a skeptic. Actually, the only reason I decided to go for it was because of the code I got after completing NaNoWriMo that year. That was how I discovered Amazon's Createspace, a stunningly high quality self publisher and distributer. I would have taken it for a scam if one of my friends hadn't already used it, and I couldn't resist. When I got my copy of the book in the mail, I was shocked to see that not only did it look nice, but it looked better than several published books I had seen.

I'll save the details of Createspace for a later post, but for now, let's just focus on why you should give serious consideration to self-publishing if you want to be a serious writer:

1.  There are a ton of options. What do you want to make? Do you want a solid, physical book? A blog? An e-book? Something to sell on Kindle, or something that will invade all sorts of media? You got it.
2. You save time and anxiety. Traditional publishing includes a lot of waiting and a lot of rejection. Writers often spend years going from agent to agent and publisher to publisher without any success, and often it takes months until you learn that you were rejected in the first place. If you hate rejection, you're not going to like this.
3. A testing ground of inspiration. If you have a manuscript that you'd like to be published, but you're not sure will make the cut, self-publishing is a great way to see for yourself what it would be like. With Createspace, you can order a test copy of your book to review before officially "publishing" it, and trust me--it's fun to see your own book in print.
4. You're in charge. You can do your own publicity and make sure that the book is going where you want it to go. Yeah, it's work, but it's better than no publicity at all!
5. It's fun. Seriously, I love going through the different templates available on Createspace and working out something that really fits the book. Whether you want to do everything yourself or just slide around pre-made options is entirely up to you.

I have self-published several books now, some more casual and some more serious. My biggest problem has been the fact that even though I've been at it for several years, I've never made more than about $20 income from it. I'm terrible at publicity, and again that leads me to why I started this blog in the first place.

Self-publishing is an awesome way to make an income from home, and it's easy to go about. First of all, however, you need to be able to sell your book! Get the word out there. And speaking of which, here are some links to the ones I've written, if you want to take a look.

The Chrononaut was my first. Not the best story or cover, but considering how new I was to the whole thing, I was very pleased with the results.

Temporation is the sequel to The Chrononaut, though also readable on its own. My designing is still below par, but the writing is much better.

The Star Chronicles is the first book in a set of six, though I have not yet decided whether to publish the other five.

Anyway, those are some of my other projects, and I encourage you to take a look if you're considering self-publishing. It's a fun and easy process, I can assure you!