Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Getting Published

Link for this book
Getting a book published has never been easy.  A well-written book needs exposure to the right editor before it can see the light of day, and editors are swamped with manuscripts, some of which are not so well written. And there are all kinds of writing services and others that are more than happy to 'help' you (for a fee of course) to get your Great American Novel published. Self-publishing has been an alternative, but there's very few authors that have the resources to handle the printing costs associated with that, and who wants a pile of books laying around that you have to try and sell yourself?

With the advent of eBooks, amazon.com's self-publishing service is a viable alternative. You'll have to do all the editing yourself, learn how to convert your book into the proper electronic format, and also market the book yourself. But what better place for a new author to try? Amazon's marketplace is huge, an author can get more royalties (percentage-wise) per digital download of their book than from a printed hard copy, you can set your own price for the book (within guidelines of course) and the service is free! 

I've been writing most of my life. Reviews of books and music, a cooking blog, classical music blog, oriental art blog, jewelry blog, origins of everyday things blog, an essays and stories blog, a series of western novels and assorted other things.  I've self-published my first western novel on amazon, Heaven's Gate, and I'm working on preparing the other books in the series for publication.  So I'm by-passing the middle man and doing it all myself. I'm going to give it a shot. Whatever my writing is worth, I've got nothing to lose!