Self-Publishing Fiction Revisited

Back in 2008, I wrote a long post about self-publishing fiction, why I'd always been against it and why I was nonetheless considering it.

In the intervening years, I never did self-publish that novel (despite a very successful history of self-publishing non-fiction) and I also didn't make much of an effort to get it published through traditional channels.

Usually, ignoring things doesn't make them better, but in this case that turned out not to be true. For authors considering self-publishing, we're living in an entirely different world from the one we lived in four years ago. That's true for a number of reasons: the growing popularity of e-books, the increasing availability of POD arrangements that don't require a huge investment from the author up front and, most recently, Kindle Direct.

So, I decided last week to take that old romance novel and make it available on Kindle Direct. The process was unbelievably easy; I set out to get it done mid-afternoon yesterday and it's live on sale right now.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing a lot more about the process of uploading, marketing, and whether or not I'd recommend this route for publishing fiction--right now it's too early to tell anything except that getting a book formatted and listed is a breeze.