self publishing

A Couple Articles by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Read this and this. I talk about Dean Wesley Smith a lot (or I did a lot on the old Story Arcs) but less about his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I don’t really know how that happened, but I am going to correct it. Personally, I think if you take her Business Rusch posts and the Shatzkin Files, you pretty much have everything you need to know about publishing as an industry. They’re well informed, experience, very analytical and sit on different sides of the publishing spectrum. Note on that, reading Mike Shatzkin is a bit like reading H. P. Lovecraft. Not so much the supernatural aspect, more like, “What the hell did that paragraph just say?” Anyway, Ms. Rusch has an incredible way of being brutally honest, and being uplifting at the same time. If you have anything to do with publishing, no matter its form, read her stuff….

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Deciding On a Publishing Path

I’ve been thinking I would actually publish this book for about three years. Not the wistful fantasies of what if, but the blood curdling idea that it might actually happen. As with anything I involve myself in, the first thing I do is research. It was a pleasant surprise to find multiple options. It was less pleasant to find the “right” path was hotly contested. Well, I’ve made a decision. I will be self publishing. At least for now. I am not writing this as a condemnation for traditional publishing or to uphold the standards of indie publishing. This is the first post in documenting the choices and challenges going down this path. I hope it is educational, and not in a “I won’t do that!” kind of way. There are a bunch of blogs that cover this, I recommend you read them first. My perspective is someone entering, and…

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A Novel In How Many Days?

While I was on hiatus, I read this series of posts by Dean Wesley Smith. The link just takes you to the first day, there are nine more and each one is more valuable than the last. Basically, he writes a full 70,000 word novel in ten days and documents his progress across each day. Ten friggin’ days. I remember when I first started writing, spending months on a single chapter. Don’t look at me like that, I was fourteen. I thought the struggle was part of the process. And that’s part of what is so great about Mr. Smith. I don’t agree with everything he states about publishing, but he serves as an essential counterbalance to everything else you hear in the industry. He is all about debunking the myths of writing and publishing, to the point he has a book called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing, much of…

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