Totally Indie

Continued from yesterday.

I worked on Storm Surge, which is its new title. The working title had to be abandoned. Changing the title was one of the hardest things I've done so far. Several of my cherished readers and I bounced around idea after idea. Nothing fit. Finally we came upon Storm Surge and the story lent itself to rewrites. When I look back at early drafts of this book, I realize how far off the plan it went ... in a good way.

During the last nine years I have read every book, internet site, and industry news item I could find about this business. I joined a couple writing forums and ended up being a moderator on one of them.

When the black hole occurred, I took the bull by the horns and decided to self-publish totally on my own. I must have coined the phrase "Totally Indie" because it doesn't seem to be out there anywhere. Four years ago, I switched from the high brow Scottsdale web company to Joyce who was and is, the perfect web designer. I already had my LLC (limited liability company) for 4 years.

I bought software to design my own book covers. Registered with the state and city as a retailer. Joyce redesigned my website. I bought a lot of 10 ISBNs and opened shop. My books came off of amazon during the black hole and were out of print. I didn't have time to waste to get all three books out or the people who had waited for Storm Surge would have killed me - they said so.

I have a real printer. They don't take a cut of my books, I pay them to print and they give me books. I use WordPerfect to do the interior of my books. It is far superior to using Word, IMO, because it does not anticipate (wrongly) but can do amazing things. It used to be the choice of most American lawyers - that's how I started using it.

I'm not hiding that I'm self-published. I've used my name as the publisher, so it is totally clear. As the saying goes, "The Buck Stops Here!" (Translation: Buck means American dollar.)

'Black hole' reference from yesterday. More tomorrow.