Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives.
This is Part Three in my continuing series of posts on the very basics of self-publishing books. This part discusses print-on-demand publishing—an indie author’s best friend (print-wise, at least).
One development that has made self-publishing much more feasible is print-on-demand technology. Instead of having to pay for hundreds or thousands of books per print run at a time, books can now be produced in single units or more at a time, as needed.
The first question you need to ask before you think about self-publishing a book is why you’re doing it. In other words, what’s your goal?
The following is something I wrote about self-publishing back in 2009 or 2010. Somewhere in there. I’ve had to update the material to reflect current publishing realities. But the point is that you can do this! It’s not always easy and/or fun, but you can! Anyway, here’s what I had to say:
When I first ventured into fiction writing, conventional wisdom was to never self-publish one’s work. This amounted to nothing less than professional suicide. Writers who self-published were looked down upon as poor, pathetic, desperate souls who didn’t have the talent or persistence to impress agents and/or publishers (especially the ones in New York, aka, “real ones”).
I followed this advice and ended up signing a contract for a three-book mystery series with a small press, which went under nine months later. My debut novel went out of print. So much for that. But I kept writing and querying agents and small presses, anyway. Over the years, I revised one novel, wrote a sequel and completed two standalone novels. Meanwhile, I still had this out-of-print novel just sitting and burning a hole in my computer. Finally, I took matters into my own hands. I decided I’d flout conventional wisdom and self-publish the book.
It’s just the tiniest bit disconcerting to run across things I said in an old blog post—a blog that is long dead and gone, BTW—in files I chose to preserve for some odd reason on dates that I’ll never know, except to say that I created them before January 17, 2014, which must’ve been the date I changed computers.
But I found them. And I’m pretty sure I wrote them and posted them on a blog I once had called Writing for Hire.