Indie publishing

Have you ever secretly wanted to be an author? Maybe you write great poetry or even rap lyrics? Ever since my Year 6 teacher told me I was a great writer I have dreamed of publishing a book. As a young girl I loved the Nancy Drew mystery series and, as a teenager I would watch Jessica Fletcher

on TV's Murder She Wrote (and even nowadays on rerun) solve the hundreds of murders that crossed her path and I entertained the idea of becoming a mystery writer. However, as I grew up, hard cash needed to be earned, nappies needed to be changed and the dream of writing a best seller slowly slipped away.

JB Fletcher

Then JK Rowling and Stephanie Myer, two Gen X  superstars, showed us author wannabes what can be done and I decided that I would try my hand at writing again. After picking a topic that interested me (no not mysteries but non-fiction biographies), I decided to try out the world of Indie publishing.

Indie publishing stands for independent publishing and it's simply the author publishing their work themselves. There is still a lot of work publishing in this manner as the author must write, edit, publish, market and manage the sales process. Many more posts will be needed to explain this further, however, today's post is about an online publishing site that can help an author publish their work as an ebook.

After writing your book, you head to a self publishing website such as Smashwords, LuLu or Amazon. I used Smashwords to publish my book Shark Tank Bios and found it a concise and fairly straight forward site to use. The founder, Mark Cocker, has a free how to guide book that you follow in order to format your book correctly and get it loaded in the right place. Smashwords has a special 'grinder' that they put your writing through (in cyber space that it is) and it checks that the layout is correct, there aren't too many spaces and other important layout and setting issues. This is really important because how your work looks on word can be completely different from how it looks on a device. And again, it can look different on an ipad and a kindle. The grinder helps to sort out issues so that your final product is at its best.

Are you the next author sensation?

Smashwords will send your ebook to various bookstores like Apple and Barnes and Noble and readers can purchase it from there! One big problem is Amazon don't take their ebooks so you have to load your book onto Amazon directly. I haven't figured out how to do this yet, but I will as it is really important to get onto Amazon as it is the biggest online book and product store there is.

So now there is no excuse not to write that best seller you have been sitting on! Or even just to write books for your kids to read. I must say that it is pretty exciting when you see your book on the stores' bookshelves. I figure if only my family and friends buy my book then I will still be happy!