Like many of you reading Suzanne’s blog perhaps, I have written most of my life, having published a textbook, several book chapters and over thirty-five articles in my former fields of hospital administration, medical ethics and cardiac pathophysiology. After leaving my former career, self-publishing became an easy way to promote my business and provide information for my customers via articles and E-Books. But I did not think of these works as “real”, after all, I simply wrote, revised, revised some more, formatted, re-formatted (actually Suzanne did the formatting and the re-formatting!) and published on Kindle and Create Space for my book on poetry. But that’s too easy, isn’t it?
Self-publishing the novel, a seeming endless labor lasting over six years, was not an option until now. Here is why.
An Esteemed List of Self-Publishing Authors
One of the more enjoyable facets of taking on a writing assignment like this one for Suzanne is the discovery of one’s prejudices and errors in thought. Take the decision to self publish, for example. I had assumed self- publishing (for real books, that is) to be a relatively new phenomenon used by those writers who possessed no chance of being published by a traditional publishing house: Wrong on both counts.
The list of authors to publish their own works include many esteemed authors: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe , James Joyce, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Henry Thoreau and that is only a partial list. Perhaps like me, you are aware of the phenomenon of Paul Young’s book The Shack and certainly of JK Rollings’ Harry Potter series. But did you know they were both originally self-published by the authors? Young wrote The Shack as a story for his children and due to pressure from friends, agreed to self-publish the work for them – recent estimates place sales at just over 10 million copies. Rollins sold her Harry Potter series as E-Books directly from her website, Pottermore and Jack Canfield, after many hundreds of rejections from literary agents, self-published Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Why and How I Self-Published a Book
Several years ago, James Altucher, an investor, stock trader and multi-millionaire wrote a blog post which begins with his statement:
“…I’m never going to publish in the morgue of the publishing industry again. …The book publishing industry is dead and they don’t know it.”
I have read Altucher’s blog with delight for a couple of years but re-read this one recently. Altucher has published five books traditionally and makes his startling introductory statement because he received little or very little money from the five publishers; scant royalties, paltry advances and almost no support for marketing.
It is strangely liberating knowing I do not need to rely on the prestige of a major publishing house, who may not deliver on all implied promises, to achieve my real goal – to get my story told.
Dr. Lin Wilder
Most recently, Wilder published two articles for Canticle Magazine: “To Love is to Suffer” and “Our Battles are Many” under the name Wilder; additionally, she has published over twenty articles on line on subjects related to on-line marketing.
Follow Lin Wilder on her website: www.LinWilder.com
