Some visitors to this website will be old enough to remember when freelance authors had three options for seeing their work in print, back in the pre-Digital Age days:

1. Traditional Publishers: The ideal! Persuading a traditional publisher to publish your work was (and possibly still is, though less so) the ideal avenue. After acceptance, working with editors to fine tune the project to their specs and possibly agreeing to venture out on author signing tours were the only requirements. The publisher would do all the rest: cover design, printing, distribution, marketing. And what was involved in snagging an idyllic contract with a traditional book publishing company? Firing off a cannon load of book proposals accompanied with the obligatory one to three sample chapters, then fielding the volley of rejection letters they fired back. I even received rejection letters that stated my books were of too high a quality for their target audiences. Were they being polite? Possibly, but the message still amounted to the same: rejection. The conventional advice was to enlist a literary agent, but they were as and in some cases more reticent to take on unproven authors as publishers were. After I did find an agent and one of my fictional series was accepted by a large traditional Christian publisher and actually listed in their catalogue, their editorial management team decided to change direction away from the type of fiction my series fell into before the books went to print. Devastation does not begin to describe my emotional state.

2. Self-publishing Services: If you had a few thousand extra dollars kicking around, this was a possibility. The self-publishing service would basically print a minimum number of copies of your book (at least into the hundreds to make it worth their while) for you to distribute and market however you saw fit. There are plenty of sad stories of self-published authors with boxes of books stacked up in their garages. Distribution and marketing sound a lot easier than they are. I personally did not seriously consider this option, mainly due to the funds issue.

3. Photocopy and Give Out to Friends: Photocopy some copies of your book at work when your boss isn’t looking and distribute to your friends…I actually went for this option (this was before my Christian conversion) and still feel a little guilty about it. I made only a couple of copies this way, but it was a long book. This was before 3-in-1 printers in home offices. At this point we were using typewriters. Dot-matrix printers alongside personal computers were just hitting the market – some of the more expensive ones even had hard drives (I’m really showing my age here!).

You can see why a lot of truly talented writers gave up on writing! It just wasn’t worth the effort, not when life offered so many other opportunities for actually making a living. But giving up what you most loved doing and what you somehow felt called to do was not easy.

So what’s changed for the freelance writer in the ensuing years? Everything. The Internet has opened up possibilities we did not even dream of 25 years ago.

There’s basically no excuse today for the gifted writer not to find his or her audience. It still takes work. And patience. Writing may not be the problem, but learning the ins and outs of marketing in the Digital Age is still challenging. Many writers are humble people who prefer to work away quietly on their projects, but part of self-publishing in the Digital Age is the need to market printed or digital work, especially through social media, to run promotions, to garner some good reviews. This doesn’t come naturally to many, shall we say shy, writers. And because of the relative ease of self-publishing (compared to say, 25 years ago), there are a lot of writers (good and not-so-good) jumping into it. For readers, it is akin to weeding out the wheat from the tares.

Basically, the infamous slush pile (or more aptly, sludge pile?) of publishing has moved to Amazon and Smashwords.

For those who just want to write without having to worry about all the distribution and marketing hassles, opportunities to work under contract as a ghostwriter have never been more numerous, especially through outsourcing agencies such as Freelancer.com and Upwork.com. Clients are looking for content for their informational websites, promotional copy for their ecommerce sites, material for their eBooks. This is an option, at least to start with if you are new to the field or have been away from it for awhile. It worked for me…for awhile. But when it comes to being paid a fair wage, you would likely do better to open up your own lemonade stand in the country. I have spent a couple of hours researching a 500-word article, and the going rate for such an article starts as low as 20 cents per 100 words. It would be hard to find a nation in which the minimum wage is less than 50 cents an hour.

Fortunately the freelance writer today has a golden opportunity in print-on-demand and eBook self-publishing. In this website, along with highlighting Christian and Amish-related book releases under the D. Gail name (on Amazon to start), I will be focusing on my experiences with CreateSpace and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I feel from everything that I have read that these are the best places for the newbie to begin. So I will share what I learn as I go along.

I decided to publish my first book, The Amish Research Guide (nonfiction with a limited, targeted audience), through both CreateSpace (printed book) and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (eBook). Some people still prefer having a printed book, though most self-publishers claim their eBook sales are much higher. I’ll find out! I had developed a cover for my book (I was quite proud of it – created through PaintShop Pro by someone who had next to no experience with digital photo-editing software, as in me), but the title did not fall within the requisite boundaries when I ran it through CreateSpace’s Cover Creator (a good option for those who like me do not yet feel confident enough to develop a back cover and spine along with the front cover and transform it all into a PDF).

I wrote the document in Word, which was a very good option. I’ve since saved a style in Word that matches the way I want my books to look in the future, with font type and size, indent, paragraph spacing. For both CreateSpace and KDP, using page breaks before the beginning of each new chapter and Word’s headings styles for chapter titles (in order to create a table of contents) is crucial. It pays to study up on their formatting requirements before writing – this saves time later on in reformatting. I converted my CreateSpace document to PDF before submitting, and my KDP version to HTML filtered (after removing all headers and footers, and changing my updated table of contents to links from page numbers) before sending them off. I would not recommend using drop caps for the eBook version. Drop caps look nice in the printed version but do not translate well in some electronic formats.

I perhaps should have hired an editor to edit it, but I did not. Most of my freelance work and much of my employed experience is in editing, so I felt I should be fully qualified to edit my own material. It’s unbelievable how we do not see our own errors, though. Even in the final proof I still found a couple of errors I’d missed on several previous run-throughs. Shelling out a few bucks to have another editor read through your book is really a smart move, as we seem to be blind to our own mistakes. However, at least revisions are not difficult to make on material published for CreateSpace and KDP.

Overall, the submission process for both publishing formats was unbelievably simple. In the midst of the KDP process, though, I made the mistake of choosing age levels and grade levels. Unless your book is targeted for kids, it’s best to leave these fields blank. If you assign age and grade levels, for example, it will make your book appear to be a children’s or young adults’ book. After both were live, I created my page for Author Central then began to keep an eye on the book’s progress. Amazon.ca quickly promoted it as a hot new release, and it actually became the number one bestseller in one of its categories within a few hours. But I knew that I still had to do my part to bring it to the attention of those who would benefit from it most, fellow non-Amish writers around the world trying to create primarily fiction about the Amish.

That meant marketing – not my favorite activity. But on another page I will share my findings that will hopefully be of value to other indie authors.

Below is a link to self-publishing resources available on Amazon for indie authors.

Self-Publishing Resources