Release day is finally here. Today, I go from “aspiring” novelist to novelist. There’s a huge leap between “aspiring” and what comes after that. One is a dream or a possibility; the other is the reality, which may not correspond to all the hopes and dreams that go with “aspiring.”
There’s a phrase people use when talking about a task they can do competently: if it were easy, everybody would do it. Publishing, and particularly self-publishing, is like that. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can try taking the easy (and expensive) path: pay some service to do everything for you. I’m publishing my first novel, so you could argue that I don’t know what I’m doing, since I haven’t done it before. But paying a service to do it for me is not my way, as anybody who knows me will attest.
I’m old enough to remember (maybe it’s still happening; I don’t know) the competition among Anonymous Cowards (that’s the default un-authenticated user name) to get first post on any Slashdot article. Well, when you have your own website, it’s rather easy since you have no competition. That doesn’t make me any less excited to be writing my first blog post on my new website.