If you work outside the book industry, you may not know that there is a revolution underfoot.  Amazon is shaking up the publishing world, delighting some and infuriating others.  Lucky for me, I fall into delighted category – with KDP & CreateSpace, Amazon has created the tools for me to successfully (I hope!) publish my own book. There’s a lot that goes into publishing a book.  There’s the writing, of course, but what no one tells you is that the writing is only a tiny porti

Last week in Part 1 of this post I wrote about how I managed the undertaking of writing a novel.  This week I’m going tackle the harder part – the “Why.” Why would anyone write a novel?  There are certainly plenty of reasons not to – the sheer volume of work, the difficulty of coming up with something new and different, the inevitable criticism (both deserved and not), the oft-underestimated amount of labor needed to get people to actually read said novel…  So why would anyon

Since I’ve started telling people that I wrote a novel, the questions I get asked most often (besides, “What’s it about?”) are “Why?” and “How?” It’s really amazing how much those three little letters can capture – as in, “Isn’t that incredibly difficult?  Do you really think you can be successful as a novelist?  Do you really want to deal with the rejection and public humiliation which could come with putting yourself out there like that?  How do you even get started on such

Dear Reader, Thanks so much for visiting my website! As you may have surmised, my name is Samantha and I am the author of the upcoming YA sci-fi novel Stitch. Stitch is my very first novel, and as a first time novelist, I’ve found the blogs of other authors to be incredibly helpful in getting acquainted with the daunting world of publishing. The goal of this blog is to document my trials and travails as a debut author to share with future writers who are embarking on the same