Saturday, September 24, 2011

100 sites for fiction writers: #58 - Step-by-Step Self-Publishing

This is an ongoing series looking at websites that can be of help to fiction writers with their craft and career.


Step-by-Step Self-Publishing


Christy Pinheiro has her own publishing company, is a financial writer and the author of a number of e-books. Nick Russell is an author, public speaker and the founder of an online newspaper about RV travel. Why do you need to know about these people? Because they are the people behind the scenes at the Step-by-Step Self-Publishing website.

There are a lot of sites out there that are somewhat helpful one way or another for beginning writers who want to self publish, but few of them are as blatant about offering important resources as Step-by-Step Self-Publishing. Many sites just give you a few vague ideas or some rah-rah, go-get-'em-tiger speeches. This site does more helpful than that.

How does this site really shine? As I mentioned, Resources. Beginning self-publishers often need an editor and/or proofreaders, and there's a list of freelancers at this site who can help you with that. What about someone to format your books and e-books? That can be found here as well. If you should need a copyright attorney, this is also the place to look.

Better than the resources list, though, is the Reviewer List. Reviews can help to sell books and e-books, but often enough it is no easy task to find book reviewers. The list here offers scores of reviewers, and even links to other lists of reviewers. If you've never published a book, you have no idea just how helpful this list can be.

And once you publish a book, you will definitely want this list. Not every reviewer will be right for you, of course, but it helps to find out who is out there and just what they review.

Also, as can be expected, there are a few Articles about self publishing and a Blog, and these should be looked over and considered. But I still think that Reviewer List is worth its weight in gold, and the Resources list isn't too shabby, either.

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Reviewers, I need to look more into that. For sure.

Self Publishing said...

The art of getting published these days is a rare commodity indeed. Many times, authors that are in the market of trying to get published will write umpteen query letters, send off countless chapters for initial review to agents and then receive the "Thanks, but no thanks, Don't call us, we'll call you" letter. Dejected and frustrated, the author pulls themselves up by the bootstraps and hones their manuscript once more, writing an even more intriguing query letter to the next agent or publisher only to get continually rejected. That makes self-publishing neat.