I began writing four years ago and sharing stories with many friends and unsuspecting strangers. Their comments and feed back kept me going and led me to submit these little fictions to some of the many on-line journals for consideration -- twenty or thirty times until one little piece (Hello Pretty Boy) stuck on a Scottish site: http://www.shortbreadstories.co.uk/search/results/#axzz2fLsHInzs).

One benefit of sharing and submitting is that it has prompted me to rework material as I
learn to better see and hear what is on the page. During the last several years, stories have accumulated along with a novella which came out of my participation in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November 2011.

At some point I got the idea of bundling them into a collection with the novella as the capstone referencing each of the stories and set the goal of actually putting it out there in public, becoming a published author. Wow.

The next challenge was figuring out how to do this, a task which breaks down into two parts: publishing and marketing. (We´ll look at marketing next time.) Fortunately, there are blogs and people accessible on the Net to help. Unfortunately, there  are so many that my writing took a backseat to research on publishing.

One outcome has been this author website which I set up as a platform for blogging and marketing. For now, rather than buy/rent the domaine www.williamgeuss.com, I chose the free option www.williamgeuss.weebly.com; a number of sites offer the same, e.g. www.wordpress.com, www.web.com, etc.

In coming installments, I will talk in more detail about how to:

 found an imprint to publish from (in my case Backcourt Press).

 find editors (to edit my ca 90,000 word ms).

 reserve rights to an image for your cover and hire a designer.

find someone to format your book for upload
to both Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.

purchase ISBN numbers.

Other good stuff (no doubt).

William as in Shakespeare

 ps I plan to blog my way through the above process  in more depth with costs and sources to keep things moving. Do let me know how you are progressing and what you want to know more about/share good things you find by commenting here or to williamgeuss@sbcglobal.net.

Reaching that decision and seeing it through to publication in October using Backcourt Press, an imprint of my own, will have taken five months of writing time -- that's FIVE MONTHS. But, what the heck, my stories benefited from five more months of revision, and besides, I didn't learn how to craft fiction overnight either! 

Since learning about the publishing and marketing process is what is uppermost on my mind, I will blog it and would welcome any exchange of ideas on that.

The first hurdle to clear was deciding print (e.g. paper or hard cover), eBook, or both?
While there are any number of acceptable pathways to publication at only two to four times the cost involved in the do-it-yourself approach, handing off the job means you end up dependent on others for each work you publish after that. So there are economies of scale with each subsequent book when you apply all of the marketing and publishing savvy gained with your first effort. Moreover, printing on demand always remains an option even if you decide to first publish as an eBook.

At my age (old enough to wish I had started writing much earlier), I am in a hurry and not eager to spend years courting agents and publishing houses. Even though traditional publishing has contracted mightily, many other doors have swung open, so I decided to knock on as many as it took until what I saw inside looked "right " (doable and affordable) for me.

By the way, be prepared to meet any number of well-intentioned folks whose job it is to pull you through their door. They are generous with their time and very persistent; you end up learning quite a lot from their gratis consultations, offers of services--and you will get lots of email from them.

To get a thorough introduction to self-publishing resources check out Marilyn and Tom Rosses blog http://selfpublishingresources.com/blog/ 

I have gone down that road, and I chose to self-publish my collection of stories as an eBook. 

Next week I will describe the costs involved so far and the strategy I have adopted to market my publication(s).

Any comments or resources you´d like to share would be most welcome via the Facebook and Twitter tabs at the top on Home.
William as in Shakespeare