From There to Here

"From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere."  ~ Dr. Seuss

I started out self-publishing. I published my first novel all the way back in 2010. Back then, there weren’t as many of the vanity press publishers as there are today. Many of the publishing contracts, when I originally was thinking of publishing my book, were not very advantageous for the author, but rather lucrative for the publisher. So, unless you sold millions of copies of your book, you really weren’t going to make much profit.

The idea came to me to self-publish. I knew absolutely nothing about the process and admittedly, my husband did most of the work for the first book, so I will not write about that experience. But the second and third books I published were all me. I did everything from writing, to layout, to cover design, to promoting. It was a lot of work and I sold very few copies of my books.
 
It was a challenge to learn new software. I used Adobe InDesign for the layout. Luckily, there were a lot of YouTube videos on how to do things because it was very frustrating. Adobe Photoshop was worse. The program itself was fine. The error was with the user. Maybe that’s not entirely fair. The program is so extensive, unless you use it often, there is so much that can be done it’s overwhelming. I ended up just watching videos on the specific things I wanted to do. Otherwise I got too confused.

Once I finally managed to get the book laid out and the cover conceptualized, I needed to figure out how I was going to print the book. I chose to use Amazon’s CreateSpace, which I think now has changed its name to Kindle Direct Publishing, though if I type in "CreateSpace" in the internet search bar, I get to where I’m wanting to go.
 
CreateSpace is pretty easy and there are many helpful links. You can use this site to do everything. It’s an a-la-carte type of thing where you pay for the services you use. They have folks who will copyedit the manuscript, lay out the book, and even design the cover, depending on how much money you want to spend.

I did everything myself and used their service simply to get my book for sale on their site. The three books I self-published didn’t make me enough to allow me to pursue writing as my career. Admittedly, I got a little discouraged, and thought I might as well not put forth all the effort if no one was going to read the books. Once the three books went up on Amazon’s site, I focused on writing and stopped thinking of publishing.
 
Fast-forward ten years. During that time, I not only added my daughter to the family, I wrote something like fifteen novels. And by novels, I mean extended novels. Ernest Hemingway I am not. I tend to write BIG books. My average novel is a hundred thousand words. Some are between eighty and ninety thousand, and some are a hundred fifty to a hundred eighty thousand words.

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” 
​~ Ernest Hemingway

While I was busy writing, tons of vanity press publishers sprang up and the idea came to me to give one of them a try. My mom saw a television commercial for one such publisher and encouraged me to give them a call. With naïve hope, I did and decided to give them a try. I went with Newman Springs out of Red Bank, New Jersey. The problem with this is all the costs had to be paid by the author. Their contract stated they wouldn’t take any royalties until a hundred percent of my investment was returned, which sounds like a win-win, and it probably would be if enough books sell to actually recover the cash outlay. For me, that wasn’t the case. I was out thousands of dollars and did almost as much work as when I had done it all myself. Needless to say, I didn’t use their services for a second book.

Fast-forward another five years, and here I am now. We left the busy, over-crowded, and expensive area of Seattle and moved to a small town in North Idaho. The housing is manageable, and the people are friendly. I now have the luxury to be retired at a fairly young age. I get to be a full-time mom and unschooling guide for my daughter. I never stopped writing and added a few more novels to my unpublished bookshelf. As the calendar flipped over onto my 50th birthday, I decided it was time to give self-publishing another try.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." ~ not Albert Einstein

Turns out Albert Einstein never actually said this quote. Funny how things get mixed up.