{"id":10,"date":"2011-07-03T22:09:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T12:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.petersahui.com\/fiction\/?p=10"},"modified":"2011-07-09T20:55:21","modified_gmt":"2011-07-09T10:55:21","slug":"adventures-in-self-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.petersahui.com\/fiction\/2011\/07\/adventures-in-self-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Self-Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing fiction as a hobby for years, and like many other authors, I wanted my short stories to be published by an established magazine or website. For most of that time, to say self-\/vanity publishing carried a stigma was an understatement. Sure, if you were a crank who claimed that Elvis revealed himself to those wearing tinfoil hats, you might self-publish. But if you produced Real Writing, you sweated it out, researching markets on Ralan.com or Duotrope.com, sending out your manuscripts, waiting months in the slush pile, all in the hopes of $0.05 a word from a professional market.<\/p>\n

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Well, I sweated it out. I researched markets. I sent out those short story manuscripts that I thought were worthy. At the last place to which I submitted a manuscript, I waited nine months in the slush pile — only to receive a form rejection slip.<\/p>\n

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I had two choices, it seemed. Spend months more working my way down the list of magazines to those that pay little or nothing, or let my stories die in obscurity on my hard drive.<\/p>\n

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Instead, I opted for a third choice. Self-publishing.<\/p>\n

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Several factors drove my decision:<\/p>\n

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  1. Ebooks are finally getting traction in the marketplace<\/a>, driven by Amazon.<\/li>\n
  2. It’s now very easy to publish an ebook, again courtesy of Amazon and its ilk. As a result…<\/li>\n
  3. The self-publishing stigma is ebbing rapidly. Every other month, the media will run a story on an ebook author who’s made it big<\/a>. Obviously these aren’t representative of every ebook author, any more than JK Rowling is representative of what traditional authors can look forward to, but it shows that self-publishing is becoming more mainstream.<\/li>\n
  4. Lastly, I had nothing to lose, since the markets that most interested me had already rejected my manuscripts.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    I didn’t pull the trigger straight away – it took me months to iron out a structural issue with the manuscript that I most wanted to publish. But other than that, the process was remarkably straightforward: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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