Happy Birthday, Cosima 🙂 I hope today was wonderful 🙂
I’ve been very silent on this blog. Formatting and learning about self publishing took more time and effort than I thought. At the same time I’ve been trying to finish my 2024 project, “Where the Highway Meets the Corridor”. The 2024 project is about done, I just got some wonderful feedback from a friend who beta read it. So I’ll be making some updates. Thanks Lucy 🙂
But, the bulk of my focus these last 6 months has been self publishing. And the bulk of that focus has been deciding “should I?”. I didn’t really start the Imbibe Universe with an idea of self publishing. I didn’t even start it with print books in mind. I think discovering that Barnes & Noble offers a self publishing, print-on-demand option helped a lot. I don’t have an Amazon account, and I’ll take any chance I can to avoid giving money to the top dog. I would be saying something different when B&N was putting local book shops out of business.
The last 6 months has been formatting, exporting, proof reading, more formatting, learning about ISBN’s, making decisions, and journaling about the concept of arrogance and the idea of being worthy of removing one’s ideas out of their electrical mass of meat and placing them in the public. It’s scary.
Even now, as I draft this post, I’m looking at the button in the B&N module that says “Put On Sale” and I’m rethinking my decisions.
Ultimately, I don’t think I found some single word or piece of reason or logic that convinced me that I was worthy of moving forward with publishing. I think I defaulted to my normal modus operandi, which is the gut feeling that there’s a limited number of hours in a life time, and the reality that unless you do the work, those ideas disappear.
Which, now I know, is anxiety. Anxiety drives me. Always has. Always been there. Thankfully therapy helps. Therapy and writing things out.
So, thanks for reading through that anxiety with me. You’ve enabled me to press that “Put On Sale” button, and the first 4 books of the Imbibe Universe are now for sale. “Where the Highway Meets the Corridor” will drop next. And then “Post-Apathy” later this year.
These books are also paired with a selection of stickers available through Redbubble. It’s been a fun 6 months.
