DIY publishing

If you google "diy publishing book," it looks like everyone in the world wants to help you do it -- for a fee.  That aside, more and more authors are electing to self-publish.  The story quoted below -- about author Theresa Ragan -- is from an article in Huffington Post and explains why authors choose to self-publish.

 For nineteen years she was mostly a stay-at-home mom raising four children -- all the while penning romance novels. But she got nowhere with a few agents and was turned down over a hundred times by publishers. Although she knew about self-publishing she dismissed it as a vanity club. In 2010, while surfing the web for a job to help pay the bills, she stumbled on an article by a successful self-published author which prompted her to give it a shot ("what do I have to lose?"). She hooked up with CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com and self -published her first book in March 2011 in both paperback and e-book formats. Within the first two months she was stunned by the sale of over two thousand copies -- and the sales continued to rise. To date, she has self-published four romance and two thriller novels with sales exceeding three hundred and fifty thousand copies. Theresa expects to cross the million dollar mark in royalties by March 2013. And the good news doesn't stop there. Several top-line publishers are pursuing her.Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's "traditional" mystery and thriller line, will now republish her two thrillers. In my interview with Theresa Ragan on August 21, 2012, she said that prior to venturing into self-publishing, "I would have gratefully signed with any traditional publisher with no advance and a six percent royalty." Lucky for Theresa that all the publishers passed on her.

This article in Forbes reports on the first self-published no.1 best seller, Wait for You by J. Lynn.  It also gives some pointers on how to sell your book successfully, that is, make money at it.

Many of the guides available about self-publishing cost -- sometimes in the hundreds of dollars.  But you can find good information for free on all aspects of writing at Authonomy.  It's interesting to note that Amazon's CreateSpace offers all the information on self-publishing.  Nook has also entered the market for self-publishing e-books with NOOK Press.

An intriguing and informative approach to writing could be something like Wattpad, where you can "Discover a World of Unlimited Stories."  At this site you can --

Find your audience on Wattpad! Write one chapter at a time, or share your full novel. Introduce us to great characters; explore new genres, entertain us and make us laugh... or cry.

Similar sites are Figment, WritersCafe,  weBook, and FictionPress.

-- Marge