Take a Deep Breath.....and Push That Publish Button!

It doesn't seem like it should be such a big deal....but then you realize, OMG, I'm here, after all these years, and all that work and all those rewrites and the really big decision to take it from a formula romance into a romantic adventure....and then moving it even further away from a romance....and then coming back to it and realizing certain key scenes that had survived all the transitions were really badly overwritten.....

Ok, enough of the writer angsting....

It's official!!!  A Winter's Tale was uploaded to Smashwords as an ebook yesterday!!!  Dan watched while I hit the button and then popped the champagne cork.  It took about 30 minutes to get through their cue and be checked out by their Autovetter for formatting issues, which gave us a countdown while we were waiting and then all the little boxes started turning green!!!

Of course I really meant to have this post go up last night, but by then we were deep in the weeds of trying to figure out why a graphic for the web page was loading in horrible purple and green colors.  Turns out it had been done in CMYK instead of RGB.  Of course.  So now the web page is also up at Alestro Publishing .

So....thanks sooo much for all the positive feedback, encouragement, etc. from everybody!!!

Next up, get it up as a POD (more to follow on that) and then maybe one of these days I can go back to actually writing a book.......

The Longest Journey, the Single Step and All That Jazz...

Hi.  My name is Cecily Felber and I'm about to self-publish my historical fiction novel, the first of four in a series.  It's entitled, A Winter's Tale and takes place in mid-12th century England when two royal cousins were contending for the throne and the smaller neighboring country of Wales was trying to maintain its autonomy.

Like any other author, mine has been a long and winding road to get to this point, with periods of intense enthusiasm and inspiration interspersed with periods of despondency and essential giving up.  Writing something publishable is only half the battle—in some ways, the easy half.  Once you’ve got it done, you have to convince someone to publish it.  Unfortunately, things are no longer like they were back in the "good old days" when (in theory) a writer with a quality product only needed to hang in there and keep sending in their manuscript before some agent or publisher would recognize it as Something That Will Sell.  For years now, I've been hearing about how the first cutbacks publishers make are the staff that read unsolicited manuscripts (with the second being editorial staff--which is why you encounter so many typos in books these days, even published by "respectable" labels).  Of course this makes it even more discouraging for us unpublished types, who are already prone to worry our material just isn't really that great after all....

So about a year ago, I found out about ebook and POD (Print On Demand) sites that are pretty plugged into the big distribution houses like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.  What I saw and learned really got me excited and so I've been working toward getting my manuscript into shape and putting it up ever since (I'll talk more about the platforms I'll be using in a future post).  And as I got closer and started considering how to get the word out about my books, it just seemed natural to start a blog where I could talk about this process, about my experiences and insights as an author, about the books themselves and their content, about the history behind them and about anything else people who are (hopefully) following this are curious about.

I'm just getting started here and things are very much still under construction.  I'll be setting up pages and accounts on the various social network sites and will post announcements and links about that here as well as links to where to download and read my work when it goes up.

So....feel free to comment and ask questions—and thanks for coming along on my journey!