Of a certain age...

Yay! My book is finally in print. Do you have any idea what it takes to get a book into a finished product these days when you do everything yourself? Publishers don't want anything to do with you unless you have an agent, and agents won't return your calls unless you're already a best-selling author, so self-publishing is the alternative for wannabe authors, unless you can pay someone to do it for you.

Even if you could find a willing publisher, they still expect the author to do the marketing and buy their own books so why not do it all yourself anyway? It gives the author more control, too.

But, OMG, who knew it was going to take me 10 months to actually birth the thing? I produced babies in less time!

I started this process in May thinking I'd have the editing, proofreading, formatting and cover ready to upload to the online POD (print-on-demand) book printer by the end of summer. You can probably sense how smoothly that went!

I'd actually written this text 10 years earlier and it's been available as an e-book under a different title for several years. I felt the urge to have it in print and to make it into a workbook because that's really the kind of book it is. When I re-read the content I realized I had to update it and add a section I didn't put in the e-book version. So I decided to make the print book a second edition, revised, and to give it a different title.

This required a lot of shifting around of text and a change of chapter order, which led to a lot of typos and sentence fragments so editing took forever. Then because I typed it in Word, it had to be transferred into InDesign and because I don't know InDesign, someone did it for me then couldn't continue and I had to find someone else, and that person decided it would be easier to format the document according to book specs herself than to teach me how... and that took months because I kept finding so many errors caused by the Word-to-two-different-versions-of-InDesign transfers.

The same thing happened with the cover. One graphics friend came up with the front cover design pretty quickly but then wasn't available when I was ready to work on the back cover and spine width calculations so the other friend who was doing the text volunteered. She also has her own design business going on so she worked on my job as she could.

In the meantime, I had to keep moving my release date goals on my blog and website where I was letting people know about the book's progress to build up interest. I think my first projected date was September 15, then I'd add another 30 days and 30 days later, add another 30 days. It was actually released January 1.

Is that the end of this story? No. Now I'm struggling with Amazon.com trying to figure out how to do all the things the author needs to do to get their page up and take advantage of what Amazon offers authors for marketing purposes. I know they think it's simple, but it's giving me a headache! Still can't figure out the Inside the Book thing and they don't offer customer service on weekends. What's up with that? I've come to hate weekends. Everything grinds to a halt for two days. This is not a 9-to-5 job!

Also along the way, I've been forced to learn social networking as a marketing tool. I still have no idea when I send something out on Facebook or Twitter who sees it or how some of the things I get find their way to my desktop. I can't wait for my grandchildren to learn this stuff so they can do it for me and I can get onto my next book.

So I thought I'd like to start an authors' support group to share tips and stories and help each other figure our way through this self-publishing and marketing maze. It's too much for one person to do alone, along with continually having to learn new software and new ways of getting published and marketing our books online. Volunteer editors, proofreaders and reviewers are welcome to join us. Contact me if you're interested at [email protected]