Saturday, March 19, 2011

A Brief Note About What to Expect

Why should you put us in your RSS feed? After all, there a ton of blogs out there about self publishing and marketing your writing, many of them so-so, but some of them brilliant. We're not here to duplicate information that's been covered ad nauseum, although we will be recognizing the best of this information and pointing you toward it. We're not going to evangelize any particular approach or platform or get into a shouting match about the relative merits of Lulu over CreateSpace.

What we will do is walk you through what we're doing, from the moment we decided to publish ourselves going forward. What did we consider, why did we make the choices we made? What worked and what didn't? What hurdles did we run into, what did we forget to do? And maybe most practically, how much time and money did it take?

Marketing your writing is a business. Writing is not so much a business as an avocation. Meshing those two things into a cohesive whole is troublesome and difficult and takes a lot of effort. It's not something that comes easy to most writers, especially those of us with houses full of kids and full-time jobs. We aim to show that it can be done.

The other thing we offer is passion. We love writing. We still get giddy and call each other up after writing a particularly gorgeous passage, saying, "Hey, listen to this..." We sweat over our character motivation, or the clarity of our prose, or agonize over a plot point that just doesn't ring quite true. We are writers first, but realize we have to be more or we'll just keep writing for ourselves and no one else.

So, here we go. Come along.

4 comments:

  1. I'm (hopefully) getting over a (hopefully) brief but intense cold, and returning to work on Sweet Dreams. Already your blog has answered some of my most basic questions. The link to 'The Book Designer' was something I desperately needed, because I didn't even know what options were available!

    Print-On-Demand is a fascinating concept I will look into once the ebook thing is going. Can't afford to start it until then, and my guess is that the ebooks will serve as advertisement for the printed copies.

    This is still a very crude understanding and I'm sure you have much more to say, but I had no understanding at all until now!

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  2. Later on today I'm going to be providing another link that you'll find really helpful. It goes over the "four self-publishing models" and will clarify some things about the different ebook and paperback options.

    Hope your cold is sufficiently banished. Spring colds seem to suck far more than fall/winter ones. (Maybe if I hang garlic around my neck, I'll be immune. Or is that vampires?)

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  3. That was the one I meant! I... don't know why I don't see it on the sidebar now. It gave me a basic idea of what we're even discussing, and boy did I need that. Now, back to Sweet Dreams. I could be half-done today. I feel like I'm taking a butcher knife to it. I have to make so many little bitty changes. Fang has some really stilted and repetitive ways of describing action.

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  4. Sweet Merciful McCartney, Keri. Did traditional book sales really drop 30% last year?! No wonder getting published has gotten so hard.

    The big question then becomes, is that difference really moving to ebooks?

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