I wrote this on my own blog, and thought it may be interesting for fellow self-publishers to share my experience.

I wanted this blog to be about writing, so I thought I would share how I came to write my first book.

In July I left work after being made redundant. I had wanted to write a book since I can remember, and I finally had some spare time, I thought, to have a go.

I have notes on a novel I have been working on for a few years now, but didn’t feel ready to go with that. Instead, […]

Author’s note: The following post was published on http://www.teresaedmond.wordpress.com.

Like many writers, for years I’ve pinned my hopes on getting that one “yes” from either an agent or a traditional publisher. I was afraid of taking the self-publishing/independent publishing route because that didn’t “validate” my author status. However, practically every agent that answered my query gave pretty much the same answer, like this agent’s answer quoted below:

Thank you for your recent query.  Unfortunately, I feel that in today’s market, I cannot take on projects unless I feel strongly about them. I’m sorry to say that it didn’t

Anything Good Takes Time.

I have read a lot of articles and advice from people about writing, and how writers should just write. Hurry up and write. Write. Write. Write. Somewhere in the article they mention, in passing, about making sure the quality is there, but the focus usually shifts back to writing fast so you can get more books out and help sell your other books.

These experts come armed with impressive data, showing that the more books you write and the more books you have available to sell, the more money you’ll make. I have […]

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s treatise on women and fiction, Mrs. Woolf lamented that, historically, women had to have both money and a room of their own in order to write – two resources that had been universally difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain back then. However, these days women (yes, yes and men, too) only need a computer and the time to write – oh, and a whole lot of confidence. But how can authors get this boost of confidence if they’re discouraged about publishing to begin with?

Easy: by publishing their short stories […]

In an ocean of self-published titles, two questions surface: How can readers find quality e-books, and how can authors of quality e-books find readers?

Before Amazon’s Kindle changed the face of electronic publishing, in 2006, 51,237 self-published titles were printed as physical books that year, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimated that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.

How can readers sift through these hundreds of thousands of self-published titles to find quality e-books that will be worth their investment of money and time?

Author collectives such as the […]

Who do you talk to more on social media, your readers or other authors? Do you spend more time online than you do writing? How much of your online time is devoted to arguing about the “future of publishing”?

At Digital Book World’s Expert Publishing Blog, Bob Mayer writes in his post  The Great Publishing Wars of 2012:

I think there is a tipping point in social media for authors.  Where it begins to detract rather than attract.   Where you are turning more people off than you are being of interest to.  Especially if you are on one