Red Hawk Ridge

Welcome to my Self-Pub Saturday Series! I’m glad you’re here. If you want to self-publish a book, I see you and I applaud you. Over the years, we have been taught that independent authors are sub-par to traditional authors, but that simply isn’t true. At this time in history, self-publishing is becoming more relevant than ever before.

Traditional publishing is glorified by the small handful of extremely popular books that have taken the world by storm, but those authors are less than 1% of published writers. In general, it is very difficult to get into the traditional publishing scene and you lose more than a little control over your work.

Creative vision has been squandered for years because we have been told that books are only worth reading if they are traditionally published. If you have even a toe in the door of the author and publishing side of the internet, you may know where I am going with this.

The old ways are dying. A select few publishers “rule the world,” and they have been created by multiple mergers of other publishing companies. Before long, you could see a publishing monopoly as the top four become one or two. It was only a few years ago that there were five.

As much as I dislike Amazon, I do have to say that they have made self-publishing accessible to the common writer. You can create journals, weekly comics, and eBooks as well as affordable paperback and hardback novels. And if you don’t want to work through Amazon, there are multiple other platforms you can publish through. Most are free, unless you use Ingram Spark, and have the ability to distribute your book worldwide.

But aside from basic publishing platforms, this series will cover a multitude of topics, including:

• pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing
• different forms of editing services
• what needs to be included on your Copyright page
• how to write an Acknowledgements page
• where to purchase an ISBN
• formatting
• cover design
• how to submit your work to the Library of Congress
• and more!

This will be a bi-weekly series until I run out of stuff to talk about, and I will take requests on topics that are on your mind. Leave a comment below, or you can follow me on my Author Facebook page or Instagram and ask your questions there. I will do my best to answer and explain in a post all on its own unless it is part of a larger topic I will be discussing. Then, I will answer it there.

There will also be a Self-Pub Library page going up, which like my Herbal Library, will need a subscription to fully access, but you will be able to find all the posts in one place. Otherwise, you might find yourself sifting through pages of blog posts trying to find what you are looking for. That same subscription gets you full access to the subscriber content on many blog posts and the Herbal Library, if you are into herbalism.

I hope to see you around in the coming months as we go on this self-publishing journey together!

Many blessings,
Emma Lee Joy