Dipping My Toes In the Water

Have I told you I’m self-publishing one of my backlist titles? I may be repeating myself, so if I am, my apologies. Keep reading anyway. ;)

Anyway, my previous publisher, Rebel Ink Press, is shutting its doors in June. I published four books with them: A Heart of Little Faith, Skin Deep, The Seduction of Esther and Miriam’s Surrender (please note, NONE of the books I’ve been publicizing for the last year are with this publisher). Since they’re going out, I’ve been getting my rights back so that those four books will no longer be available unless I do something else.

The questions is what to do? Well, self-publishing is a growing industry and hybrid authors (those who do a combination of self-publishing and traditional publishing) are on the rise. The stigma around self-publishing is gone. Because the four books I mentioned have already been released, I decided to look into self-publishing.  

I’m starting small, only working with one of those books—A Heart of Little Faith. The first thing I did was to give it to an editor. No matter how many times it’s been looked at, it can always benefit from someone other than me looking at it. A writer friend I know is also a freelance editor. She edited the entire manuscript and oh boy, there were a lot of changes she recommended. I took a deep breath and made them, and wow, the book is SO much better. 

Then I sent the manuscript to a copy editor. Because again, I always miss the little things and those are the things that end up embarrassing me (Random Reader: Did you know you spelled that word wrong?). I know someone who is phenomenal at copyediting and she found lots of things that would have been embarrassing if they had been published. 

Whenever a book is re-published, it needs a new cover. So I hired a cover artist, who designed a beautiful cover. 

Now all that’s left is formatting it for publication and putting it up on Amazon. I’m only publishing it in e-book version this time around. And I’m using this as a test run to see what happens. I know how much I spent and I’ll see how much I make in sales. If it works, I’ll self publish the others. If not, I’ll hold onto the rights for a while and see what, if any, other options I have. 

Look for the re-release of A Heart of Little Faith this summer!