Finally Made the Switch

Hey everyone! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and welcome to Maudlin's Shoes in 2014! I hope you enjoy your first official dabble of shoeless madness of the next 365 days.

So my most recent publishing news is that I finally took the plunge. After finishing my latest book, "Shifted," I have made good use of the counsel of fellow-author and self-published, award-winning Amanda DeWees and uploaded my book onto Create Space.

For those of you who don't know Create Space, it's a self-publishing platform that is so easy to use it's not even funny. You'll be sitting there thinking, wow, this is so easy, I can't believe how much I am not laughing at it.

Or you'll think it's hysterical. One of the two. I guess that doesn't leave you very many reaction options. I will also allow you amazement. You may also be allowed to show your pleasure.

I've been hesitant about self-publishing for a while, just because I still want to go the traditional publishing route. But hey, I just finished a book I'm really proud of, and I want my friends, family, loved ones, and complete strangers to read it. They can't exactly do that if I only print 10 copies from a local printer and book binding company. There's no distribution involved that way.

So I made an account and uploaded my book. Now, there are some hurdles you have to figure out as you go. Like being sure that all of your images are more than 300 dpi, which is standard quality for printing. If you don't have a program of design that will let you do that, you can use a lower resolution but it may make things a little blurry. Not necessarily the end of the world if it's not really bad, but you may also want to invest in either a good program that will let you save high-res, or invest in someone to design for you. My next book will be getting a professionally-designed cover by one of my good friends, who is a very talented artist. Now, I like doing all my own art, but I also like things looking clear. And she has Photoshop. 'Nuff said.

Making an account will take you like two seconds. Then you need a few things-- one, a full PDF of your manuscripts, and two, a back-spine-front PDF of your book cover. That gets a little tricky just because it's so hard to measure accurately, but here's the cool thing-- your files will get checked by Create Space before you can print a proof (which you want to do so you can double check it for quality before you release it on the market), so they make sure that if there's a little wonkyness, you get an alert or they just fix it automatically, or both.

So the whole process will likely take you about a week and a half to two weeks. Then your book will be available on Create Space website. You set a price, you get royalties, you have an official ISBN number-- it's really neat. You can pick the platforms that the book will be available on. For example, mine will be available on Amazon.com in a week or so. It'll also be available through various other platforms, like Barnes & Noble, etc.

Because really-- if you get an answer from an agency or a publisher, you can just take the book off the platform. But people can still get it and see it while it's up. And if you do really well on your own, well-- I guess that means you don't need a publisher, eh?

By the way, you can look at my book here. I'd love to hear what you think about it.

I'll be posting more when it's available on Amazon.com. Please, buy a copy, support local (or not so local, as the case may be) authors, and leave a review either here or on Amazon.com.