I posted this myself!

I’ve managed to defeat the blank page of doom, and get the first few hundred words down for the fantasy novel.  I have my book of notes and sketches, and I’m fairly happy I know where I’m going with it for now.  One thing I have to concentrate on is not getting distracted by maps.  I love maps, and if I’m not careful, I’ll spend most of the day working out and drawing maps of the world, or just looking at places on Google maps. 

I’ve had more feedback for The Eye of the Beholder.  I’m very pleased to hear that so far people have been enjoying the stories. 

I’ve also had a couple of questions about publishing on the Kindle.  It’s an interesting debate that people are still arguing if being “indie published” is legitimate.  Here’s my two cents on it:

Publishing on the Kindle is fairly straightforward, if time-consuming.  The time-consuming bit is that you need to have edited your work and formatted it to display correctly on the Kindle.  

It is perfectly possible to do this to a professional standard.  After all, the people who do it professionally are people that are good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  Before they got that job, they were still probably good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  As long as you have someone like that checking your work, you’re good.

You will probably find some spelling errors or mistakes creep through anyway.  That is not uncommon – pretty much any professionally published book I’ve read has a typo in it somewhere that had been missed.  The beauty of the Kindle is that if you find out about these errors, you can update the file to correct them.

 Is it ok to indie publish?  Absolutely!  (Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it!)

There is still this strange taboo about putting your work out there for writers, which doesn’t exist in other formats.  Say for example; music.   Yes, there are some people that will be putting stories up because they got rejected from every publisher for being terrible.  Likewise, there are some that just didn’t get a chance because the publishers thought it was a good story, but wouldn’t make them any money.  And then there are those of us that decided to cut out the middle man entirely and just put our work out there.

 

Why did I do it?  Well, perhaps I am being unfair to publishers, but I couldn’t see anyone taking up a collection of short genre stories written by an as-yet-unknown author.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t think they were good enough; I would never publish something that I didn’t think was up to standard.  But I wanted to get those stories out and let the readers decide if they liked them for themselves, rather than have a third party decide that they won’t for them.

 

I have faith that with the preview system, readers can check out a book, and decide if they want to read it based on the writing.  If a book is good, you can leave a good review.  If it is bad, you can leave a critical one.  Or if you are feeling nice you could contact the author directly with some advice on how to tidy it up.  I don’t think most readers would dismiss a book just because it was indie published; it’s the writing that counts.

Will I go down the traditional publishing route in future?  Maybe.  The one advantage that the traditional route has is marketing.  It’s all very nice my book being up there for the readers to make their own choice, but if they never hear of it, they won’t get the chance.