I set my mind toward self-publishing a book of short stories. I attained this goal on July 1, 2014.
Today I’m going to share the steps I followed with you, so that you may do the same. I will warn you, though: there is a lot of work involved to self-publishing and being an author in today’s world involves more than simply writing!
Doing things in the correct order is important.
Once I found out about self-publishing, here are the steps that I took (note that this is an excerpt from the post in which I was interviewed):
*asked my blog readers if they would like to read some short stories (“Yes, bring them on!”)*bought Word 2013 for my laptop*typed in my short stories*found beta readers (including you)*edited my stories using their feedback*sought guidance from Sue and Joel Caulfield about where and how to publish my book*kept doing my research and read a ton of blog posts about self-publishing until I was convinced it was something I’d like to try*tried to get a cover created – and went through a few designers*finally found one to create one for a reasonable fee*applied for an ISBN (free for me, because I live in Canada and am Canadian)*tried to format my manuscript for Amazon*sought help in an indie author Facebook group*received formatting assistance from Rich Meyer, who put the finishing touches on it*uploaded it to Amazon*realized there was one tiny error, tried to fix it and did, then uploaded a new file*wondered if I needed a new ISBN number because it was a new file (YES)*added my poem to the ebook in such a way that I didn’t have to mess around with more formatting*obtained a new ISBN for it, added it to the file, and then uploaded it to Amazon for the third and final timeI also added it to Goodreads and have plans to add it to Smashwords once it’s formatted for them (the formatting is different there).
To help motivate YOU with your book, you may want to use one of my secrets to kick-starting your writing success!
(They’re FREE.)
Oh yeah, one last thing. Buy your copy of RISKY ISSUES from Amazon OR Google Play/Google Books today – if you haven’t already!
😉
