Hey is there any authors here? I just completed my first book and self published it. It's available on amazon and Barnes and noble. Anyone else do this? I know it's obviously not a real money maker being your book just gets lost among tons of titles but I was wondering if anyone else has published. FWIW I'm a screen play writer as well and am producing a horror thriller feature film this November.

Hi Tony:

In 1987 I self published my first book. It didn't get into Barnes and Noble (or Borders) and there was no Amazon at the time, but there were a small number of stores that specialized in gambling books that I was able to sell enough of them to keep going. And by 1989 Two Plus Two Publishing was formed. So you never know how successful you might be.

Best wishes,
Mason

welcome tony.

Congrats on finishing a book. That, in and of itself, is no easy task. I've dabbled in writing, had a couple short stories published on e-zines for token payment, but nothing remotely major. I've been working on a supernatural suspense novel for about the past year but have bogged down after about 45,000 words. It was great at the start, when the idea was new and the motivation was there, but it definitely gets tough in that dreaded middle stage.

You should check out The Lounge subforum. They do writing contests every now and again. It's fun. Here's the thread from the last one, which I happened to win (shameless brag, couldn't resist). Mine is the story entitled "Your When".

I write short stories (literary fiction) and publish in lit journals. Working on a novel now, but self publishing is not something I'm interested in--you need something that's commercial and a way to promote it.

I agree. Promoting it is the hardest part.

I'm posting here because I'm having the same issue. When I was exploring writing full time 6-8 years ago the game was really different – basically you published whatever you could wherever you could in the hopes of building up enough of resume to get an agent to look at your manuscript. These days “small time” ways to publish are few and far between and not worth much. The game now seems to be self publishing and (as a result) self promotion.

Have very little idea how to do this. I've done some research but keep getting the same not very useful advice (get a million blog/vlog/twitter/facebook followers, then tell them to buy your book!) and otherwise try to figure out how to actually get eyes on my book. If anyone out there has thoughts/advice/brainstorming on this I'd love to hear it.

Ten years ago the hard part was getting your stuff into print and onto shelves – these days it's really easy to get stuff into print, but as a result there's so much stuff out there that no one gives a ****.

I'm updating a blog regularly and adding anyone who will click "yes" to my facebook friends list but even with all that and being reasonably well known around 2+2, I'd be lucky to get a few thousand people to even know my book exists. I love writing, but obviously putting 2-3 months of dedicated work on a project so you can sell $50-$100 worth of product is far from ideal.

There's a ton of advice out there on how to monetize your big fan base, but no real advice on how to acquire viewers in a world where everyone and their brother is trying to be the next literary/musical/youtube/indie sensation.