The Joys of Indie Publishing

Today I am going to take a break from my normal blog spotlight on fiction and look at the world of non-fiction and indie publishing. Several years ago my critique partners and I wrote a book on characters that we were lucky enough to get published. It was eventually picked up by Random House. After that book was published, one of the co-authors (Sue Viders) and I decided we wanted to continue offering non-fiction books on writing. We both taught writing classes (together and separately) so over the years we developed quite a bit of content as we studied writing and learned new methods that we could take to our students. We could see what worked and what didn't. We also could see where students needed more help and look for different concepts we could use to get the information across to them. We wanted our second book to be on plotting since we had focused the first on characters.
 

When we began compiling our lessons into books, we debated on how to get the works published. Since Sue had just had a good experience with the Amazon Direct Publishing program, we decided to go there with our new writing booklets. We titled the overall concept, Let's Write a Story because that was exactly what we were doing with our students--helping them write a story. As an artist, Sue developed the cover and our logo -- Dottie the Writing Mouse. Our first KDP book, Let's Write A Story: Seven Ways to Plot was published through Kindle in December 2015. But we wanted to do more than an electronic book. We got busy editing, and the print version was made available in June.

We still wanted to do more. We went back to our roots in developing characters and our latest book, Creating Memorable Characters, was published through KDP in July. The print version will be coming soon.  

We're currently in the process of finishing our next book which details our simple method of creating plots -- The Plotting Wheel. We love teaching writing classes and working with students and fledgling writers, but we also love the idea that we can get our class information out to more readers and would-be writers via Kindle Direct Publishing.

The publishing world has changed so much since we started out as writers and we applaud every new avenue that helps get the written word out to readers. We're by no means experts in indie publishing, and we are still learning, but now we get to teach and reach more beginning writers every day.


Buy Links & Contact Info


 Seven Ways to Plot




Creating Memorable Characters




Contact me:  beckygmartinez@gmail.com