Why do I self-publish?
I didn't always self-publish. Several years ago, I had two books published by a small indie firm and I learned from that initial experience. I did all the marketing and selling and incurred all the associated expenses therein while the publisher kept all (or almost all) the revenue. Both books received a number of positive reviews and the reviews convinced me I didn't need a publisher; my stories were good enough to merit publication and I could do it myself.
In addition, I got tired of pursuing the "standard" industry models. Most agents never responded to my queries and the novel submission process can take years before a "yes" or "no" is received.
Perhaps this has changed in the last few years, but I'm not interested in pursuing it. I will listen to proposals from agents and publishers if any of them wish to contact me.
Does anyone have different or similar experiences? I'd like to hear about them
Keywords:
Nothing happens in life until someone gets agita (Noun: Ital: aggravation, heart burn)”
—me
About Hank
Award-winning author Hank Quense lives in Bergenfield, NJ with his wife Pat. They have two daughters and five grandchildren. He writes humorous fantasy and scifi stories. On occasion, he also writes an article on fiction writing or book marketing but says...
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Two years ago, to show support for our armed services and to provide a measure of entertainment, Hank put together a collection of ten humorous...
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Catch-22
I'm in the same boat :)
All but the last three of my 30 books sold on Amazon were published by mainstream publishers.
As you know, the Internet has killed the print publishing industry by fragmenting the readers' audience. That's why magazines and newspapers look anorexic these days and growing thinner as we post!
My question is that I haven't earned much from my three self-published books, Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden, Fractured History Tales or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened, and Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich.
I self-published using Amazon/CreateSpace's software from hell.
How did you self-publish.
Amazon publishes books for free. Don't waste a time having a ripoff organization like iUniverse publish your book. They don't do promotion and their cover designs are beyond amateurish!
Good luck...to both of us wretched self-publishers.
Frank Sanello
Self-publishing
I've used Createspace for print books and Smashwords for ebooks. I never experienced any problems with CS and I'm about to release my third book thru them. Smashwords I think is pretty cool. They get your ebook into B&N, Amazon, Sony, Istore and other sites. They give you a big percent of the sale and have very good support. The bitch with Smashwords is they have VERY strigent guidelines and high quality control on getting published (the guidelines are in formatting, not content: Smashwords will publish garbage content as long as it's formatted correctly.) Kindle on the other hand doesn't care how anything is formatted. So Kindle has garbage content poorly formatted. A pox on them.
I haven't earned a lot from my self-published books, but the same applies to books put out by an indie publisher.