My adventures in Self-Publishing with Amazon

    It has been almost a week since I released my self-published book on Amazon and I think now is a good time to reflect. Here are my experiences.

Why I decided to self-publish Totem:

     Like so many others, I was cruising the internet looking for agents to submit my manuscript to. I did this in increments of five agents at a time. Each time I sent them out, I would sit on it and wait. When the rejection letters started rolling in, I would look at my story and make it better.
     After doing three rounds of this, finishing the second book, and beginning the third book in the series, I decided to self-publish.
     I was not getting any agent to bite. On top of that, I am an unknown author. I also know there are more stories in me. I have whole other books I want to write and I can't sit on the Totem series forever.
    I am hoping self-publishing Totem will help me in my future endeavors.

What I thought about the actual process of self-publishing:

     My advice to ANYONE who is writing a book that they know is going to be published on Amazon is to write it in the ebook format they provide. It will save you A LOT of time at the end. Besides that minor set back, the whole process was really easy.
    To top it off, any questions I had were easily answered by the hundreds of YouTube videos that break it down for you for FREE.
    In the end (after all the formatting issues were solved), it was as easy as hitting PUBLISH. Putting it into hardback was a whole other process which I would be happy to explain to anyone interested.

Release date:

    Release date came and went. Totem climbed up the chart and was actually listed as in the 26,000's that day (out of 320,000). Not too bad.
   Truth is, I expected less. I activated the Facebook page, I have a twitter account and I blog here, but I am only one tiny drop in the giant pool of web media that is created every day. I do not expect my voice to be heard.

Summary:

   This book, while I would love to see it on every book shelf I pass, is in it's purest form a labor of love and if you ask me, I feel very fortunate to have an outlet like Amazon to share my novels. Rest assure Totem is only the beginning to what I expect to be a four book series with a bunch of novellas about side characters set to be published over the next few years.
   All I can hope is that my few readers get as much joy out of reading them as I did writing them and I would recommend people use Amazon as an outlet.

Lots of love,
EM