Part Three Go Kindle

Photo By kennymatic

Give me a K
Give me a I
Give me an N

In honor of the Superbowl this Sunday, I'm going to give Kindle a shoutout. Not that it needs any help from me. More than two million ebooks have been published, with a boatload coming in every day.

As I've detailed in the last two posts, I've come in from the cold. The hard world of mainstream, or legacy as it is now called, publishing broke my heart, and into the warm, cozy (literally for me) world of online publishing. I have to say, at least I did get my books into bookstores and listed in the Library of Congress. No mean feat considering the number of manuscripts languishing in desk drawers with rejection slips stapled to them. So I'm down with gratitude for the luck I've had. Luck, I said. Not love. No, I haven't had much publishing love, a la, Stephen King and Dan Brown.

On Kindle you create your own luck and love. That's the hard part. More about that in posts to come. But I'm going to finish up this three part writing memoir about my experience with Kindle and why I am going to urge you to publish an ebook, if you haven't already.

In my infrequent posts, I have been pushing a daily writing practice. At the time I started the blog I was still looking to the mainstream publishing world to give my work a home. I assume you were as well, if you were interested in publishing at all.  But the universe has changed. With the press of a button, anyone can be a published author. You can google your name, pull up your book page on Amazon and, if you are lucky and persistent, get sales.

In this and future posts I am going to continue to praise daily writing, but also teach you how to publish on Kindle. Now I can recommend a home for your work.

For those of you who are dead serious about earning a comfortable living from writing, look to Hugh Howy, Amanda Knox, the Fifty Shades lady, and many more for encouragement. These writers hit the bullseye and are ebook gods and goddesses. But there are many other writers who don't sell books in the millions, but who make very, VERY comfortable livings from their books. I urge you to go follow them.  Continue following my posts and I will give you all the help I can to succeed.

But if you are a new writer, a timid writer, someone afraid of harsh reviews with enormous self doubt, then I want you to publish on Kindle as well.

The beauty of publishing an ebook is, for most writers, total anonymity. So if you write a clunker or fear you have, you can hide your book among the millions, safe from critical eyes, yet with the knowledge that, after all, you are a published writer. This putting your toe in the water aspect of Kindle is a godsend, I believe, for building confidence. There is always someone who has written a worse book. But seriously, you have begun the process. You can keep going, You can take yourself seriously as a writer (after all, Amazon will). You can get better and write more books. You can and will find someone out there who appreciates your take on the world, your story, your way with words. This can be very motivating for someone starting out.

Another reason for going Kindle (or iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc.) is for the community. You will get more support for your efforts, learn more, make more friends around the world and just have more fun than writing your heart out in a garret would lead you to believe. You still have to spend time in that garret, but with the knowledge that there really is a world out there waiting for your masterpiece.

Ebooks, their ease of writing and publishing--a 2,500 word story is a book in Amazonspeak, allows you to sample genres and forms you might never try. Hey, you poets. How about a zombie story?Because there is so much on Kindle to learn from, I read one cozy mystery having never even heard of them before, and made connections that led me to publishing three and am on my fourth. I adore my literary writing group, but that was never gonna happen with that bunch. We didn't know from cozies much less write them. And they will tell you so. And now, I'm going to show them how to publish their beautifully crafted literary writing.

A whole new world opened up for me when I took the plunge. I thought I knew all about writing, but I have learned more in this past year than I ever could have imagined.

And so here I am, starting with that first sentence in my first cookbook that opened up the world of writing to me (see part one of this trilogy of posts), going from publishing two books in the next thirty some years, to twenty titles published in the past year.

If an old lady with a bad heart can do it, so can you.  I wish you lots of luck and love. The Kindle kind.