The frantic peace of self publishing

It’s the eve of my books drop. Plural. I’m self-publishing my third novel and first collection of short stories next week and so I reflect on what an indie author has to do to self publish.

I decided in the week between Christmas and New Year’s to self-publish The Space Coast Tatler, and a great sense of peace lighted upon my soul.

The whole search for a publisher and/or an agent can be battering to the soul. And a prolonged search, such as so many of us have gone through, can be a prolonged beating. Most agencies and publishing houses are polite, but let’s face it. No matter how they reject you, the message is always the same: not good enough.

That’s an assessment that haunts every writer. We don’t need it reinforced.

And so, to make the decision to self-publish, not as fallback, but alternative; not as defeat, but as victory over the whole romanticized traditional publishing fiction.

It’s not as if closing to self-publish is choosing the easy route. My god, I’ve been busy, especially since in February I decided to not only self-publish The Space Coast Tatler, but also to publish my short story anthology, Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder. That decision came about like this: why not? I spent four decades working in newsrooms. There is an urgency to news that gets into your veins. If it’s ready to publish, publish it. So there, I put myself on a track to publish two books at once.

Indie writers know the routine. Get them edited. Rewrite them. Get them copyedited. Proof them. Get advance copies (of the manuscript) out to reviewers to gather some advance review buzz. Get covers made. Gather the review blurbs and get them into the front-of-book material and the cover. Get the final manuscript formatted. Get the final cover formatted. Get them uploaded into KDP. Create a marketing strategy. Create a press release and get it out. Create a promotions message and get it out. Create ads and get them out.

The activity level is frantic and relentless.

On the bright side, there’s so much, there’s no time for self-flagellation. And the freedom is, well, liberating.

Now that it’s done, and The Space Coast Tatler is to drop next Monday and Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder next Tuesday, I feel again at peace.

Nothing to do now except wait. Smile. Breathe. Raise a toast.

Like every author, I still want my books to succeed; to sell; to receive rave reviews from increasingly impressive sources; to make a little money; to, God help me maybe make a lot of money; to win awards. I’m not letting go of any of those. I’m a realist, but a boy can dream.