After many years of writing and rewriting a novel that takes place on the home front during WWII, I found an agent in New York to represent my book. She shopped it around for two years and after a couple of near misses, I decided I was done hoping for a major publisher. But I was sure there’s an audience for this book.
I started buying and reading self-published books and the more I learned about the process of becoming a publisher oneself, I knew I didn’t want to do that. Then I looked at a variety of publishing companies where I could pay a publisher to take me through the process. After looking at some of the books produced by various of these publishers, examining the covers, reading the text, counting the number of typos, I selected the best one I could find. It’s expensive; I’ll need to sell 1,000 books before I will have made up my investment with Beaver’s Pond Press. That’s a daunting number given that the average number of books a self-published author sells is 150.
But maybe I’m not exactly a self-published author. I’m publishing with an independent press. That sounds more impressive.
It turns out that even with an independent press, there’s much that depends on my efforts. The process has become fascinating to me—perhaps because it’s all new—and that’s why I’m going to blog about some of my discoveries. I expect to blog about the Second World War as well. I hope this will prove interesting and even helpful to some.
I hope you still feel that way, Dusty!