We are rapidly coming up on our one year publishing anniversary next month. It is an exciting time. We are planning on using this opportunity to take a  good hard look at how we did our first year, thank our readers and supporters with a  giveaway on Goodreads, and perhaps make some changes in how we do business.

When we started, we mulled over multiple courses of action to get our finished books out into the world. We queried several brick and mortar publishers, a number of small presses, and we talked over the self-publishing route. After waiting months for any kind of response from the brick and mortar establishment, and due to the fact that they don’t want you to simultaneously submit, we realized we could be waiting a very long time before we saw anything in print. The small presses responded fairly promptly with interest, but upon further research, we found that the first two we received had very poor reputations in dealing with their authors. That made us leery. It wouldn’t do to sign away our rights and royalties in perpetuity to a shady business.

Being an independent and suspicious bunch, that led us to our final decision, self-publishing. Another round of research ensued and we settled on Kindle Direct Publishing. With much trial and error, mostly in formatting, we managed to successfully publish our books online and eventually, offered hard copies through Createspace as well. We enrolled our books in KDP Select, which grants Amazon exclusive e-book rights for a three month period and offers us several marketing tools we would have otherwise missed out on.

But it looks like it might be time to move on, to expand our publishing options and to open new markets. We are currently considering dis-enrolling  from KDP Select and uploading our books to other e-book platforms such as iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords to name a few. It’s not a done deal yet and it may have to wait until 2015 but it does seem to be the way forward.

As for our works-in-progress, we’re adding new material and finishing up the beta read on Holly Virginia.

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!

Anne, Nancy and Eric