Writing is the easy part...

Ok, as you all know I completed my first novel, Immortal back in May. Yeah :) I never thought that would be the easy part.  It took me nearly a year and a half to complete and I ended up with five major revisions as I went through. The final book showed little if any resemblance to the final product. 

It took the next month and revised and edited to get it ready to send out to agents and took about a week to write a query letter. From what I have read and looked into a week on a query letter isn't nearly enough. Most it would seem to take an average of 3 months to get their letter in order.

Flash forward- After two months of sending out letters and getting the dreaded thanks but no thanks, I stumbled on an article about Amanda Hocking on Writer's Digest. She self-published earlier this year and has done quite well. It was an idea to tempting not to look into.

Flash-forward two weeks. After much research I decided to follow her example and e-publish.
It took me several days of extensive formatting to get it ready for upload and another few days to find and format the cover (by far my favorite part of the process). I have since placed made my novel available on Smashwords and Kindle and this weekend managed to get it up on Lulu.com in paperback.

Considering all the time, effort and energy this process took it is nothing compared with marketing.  Let's face it that is what every author, writer, blogger, and YouTube addict is doing and dreaming about. Getting those clicks and viewers to their site.  How do we do this? There are books, sites, and videos about how to do all this. In the end though it takes time time and more time. Finding the right sites to post on, networking with those you want to reach, and most of all luck.