Hope and Inspiration for Writers

That is indeed an inspirational article. I really think it is worth a try. What is so obvious is the price level. Everything must remain affordable and clearly 95 cents is a reasonable price to pay for a book. However the kindle and kindle material sites do have many problems yet. It may be rather premature to be publishing in this format but it's time will come.

The thing to bear in mind with self-publishing is that the people who make a ton of money from it are really rare. Sites like Lulu specifically state that their business model revolves around having a million authors who sell 10 books, rather than 10 authors who sell a million. The vast majority of self-publishers sell less than 100 copies. Personally, I really like having the option. If it's a simple little book, I'd go for self-pub (I already did) but if it were something I'd spent a lot of time on, I'd prefer to submit it to a proper publisher: agents and publishing houses provide a LOT of extra services you won't get in self-pub (such as marketing, down-payments, etc.). Making a self-published book popular is a lot of work, especially when you consider all the marketing you need to do to bring it to the public eye. Personally, everything I write is soft copy. But I still prefer hard-copy books, because I can take them anywhere!

I have done the self-publishing thing... I have heard it all - you'll never make any money doing that, no one respects those writers, blah blah blah. But then I hear about people like John Locke, and Anne Rice, who have chosen to publish their books in this manner and have been successful and it makes me just want to thumb my nose at those people telling me to do it "the right way." As far as writing... I do most of my writing on the computer. It's faster and doesn't make my hand cramp up the way writing with a pen or pencil does. But sometimes, when I get stuck, I dig out a notebook and try scribbling things down with a pencil. It does help sometimes. I have my book available in paper and digital formats (actually just figured out that I had an e-book version the other day...probably always knew that but had just pushed it to the back of my mind). My biggest problem with e-books, besides the cost of the gizmo and the part where I hate reading from a computer screen...it hurts my head... is that you can't give someone an e-book as a gift. Well, I'm sure there is some way to do it but I gave someone a copy of my book recently and he was so excited that he completely tuned out my nervous chatter and just started flipping through the pages. You can't get that reaction with an e-book.