My Publishing LLC.

So today I want to start out by telling a short little story. 

Being the closet aspiring writer that I am I sought out, in the shadows of course, a published author that I happened to meet.  She was nice enough, and I asked her if I could buy her dinner and pick her brain about writing, and she agreed. 

I had been writing at this point for about six years.

At dinner I asked her, did you ever think about self-publishing?

No – she said – Self-publishing is not being an author, and I wanted to be a real author.

Suddenly tweed jackets and a snifter of brandy ran through my head.  So I asked – are you happy with the result of your book?

They changed it a little, but I guess thats what they do- she replied.

Red flags rose in my head.

Her book was doing quite well, so I asked – are you making a decent profit off your book?

Not really.

Huh- I thought.

I am not trying to justify my being an independent author, but there has to be a better way than sending it to an agent for approval, then to a publishing house for further approval.  Why not put your book out there and let it stand on its own merit?

My decision on where to publish and a small piece of advice…

So here it is Friday, and as promised I will share the company I will go with for my publishing.  So in the independent realm of publishing there is seemingly a few number of ways to self-publish, well that was how it seemed to me at first anyway.  There are places like AuthorHouse, IUniverse and so on.  A friend of mine published a book a year ago with this method and after a short conversation with him I thought that maybe this way would be the right way for me.  So, being the neurotic that I am, I sat down with him and talked with him again about the pros and cons of the route he went.  He told me that, if he were to publish again that next time he would use more of a book producer than a self-pub company, and he would also create his own label.  This actually appealed to me a lot.  So I went on the ole’ Internet and began to look up places that could fulfill my needs in this area.  This is when I found CreateSpace.  CreateSpace is a place where you can publish and keep not only the rights to your book but most of the royalties as well.  They do this because they are more of a book producer than a self-pub company.  Another thing, when going through more notable named self-publishers you received on average about 25% of the royalties of your book, and that’s when you go through their website.  You received less than that if you go through their website and sell a book on Amazon.  With CreateSpace you can use their handy royalty calculator to figure out how much you will make per book, and with me this was the deciding factor.  So I am going with CreateSpace and I am going to make my own publishing label, and my own LLC.  Stand by for my symbol and company name.  So all you out there research what your buying, and as I stated before, if it seems like a good deal, something may be wrong with the services or the royalties.