I am published!

It has been a long, long, long journey.

I finished The Lost Princess a year and a half ago. I pitched it around to many agencies and publishers with no success. A friend suggested self publishing since I write quickly and have several books under my belt. But getting to this publishing day took a LOT more than simply writing a book.

Let’s make a brief mention of the various roadblocks in life that prevented me from publishing. There were many, varying from being too busy with everyday life, to major events that put everything else on hold. For example (and this is only the latest in over a decade of setbacks) almost exactly one year ago I was ready to upload my book when I got a phone call that my mother was in the emergency room. Eight months later she was done with surgeries and chemo, so I put myself back on the road to writing. (The entire string of events like this would take several blogs, so you may breathe a sigh of relief that I won’t bore you with “Woe is me” stories.)

When I finally got back to my writing, book 2 flew from my fingers. Advice from others was to make sure you have another book ready to come out before publishing the first. Mission accomplished. Book 2 was done and I sent it to my beta readers while I worked on getting the first one out there. But it is far from simply uploading your novel to a program and hitting “publish”. You need to format, edit, copy, re-format, re-edit, all before you can see a proof. After that comes the physical proofs that take about 4 days each. I went through 3 proofs before I hit that publish button.

It has been so time-consuming up to this point that I set aside all day today to prepare those last steps, but it was a bit anticlimactic. It took all of ten minutes to check my work then clicking on the “publish my book” icon. My finger froze over the mouse button. “Really? All this and it comes down to one click?”

But I did it. I really DID it. And though it was a simple click, the fact that anyone can now purchase something of my own creation is a bit exhilarating. After all the struggles, even if I sell only single digits, I FINALLY DID IT!!