I've been looking at articles on the internet (there are some very interesting blogs out there as well) that talk about self publishing versus mass market publishing. Since I haven't published to the mass market yet, I thought I'd let you in on why I chose to do what I've done.

Self publishing isn't the easiest route to take. Trust me on that one. It takes a lot of time and causes a lot of frustration when you're formatting a manuscript for publication on your own. I never realized I'd have to work so hard to make text fit into margins. I had no idea what bleed was. I didn't realize I had to embed a font in a pdf to make it readable. The formatting alone is frustrating and time consuming.

Then there's your cover to consider. Do you want a generic cover or do you want something that really pops and has some bearing on your work? I chose the latter and that causes it's own set of problems. If you use an image that isn't your own, you have to worry about copyright. I am blessed to have a very artistic husband who can draw and knows his way around a digital camera. Once you have a cover image, there's formatting to consider. Again, you have to work with fonts for your title. All of this is an insane amount of work.

I learned with Prophecy that if I don't inspect every single page of the formatted manuscript, there are problems. If I could do Prophecy over again, I'd fix it all. I'm still thinking about that. With Forbidden, I did another edit while I was checking the formatting for errors and found places that needed to be combed through again and have additions put in. After all that work, Forbidden is the better novel as far as formatting is concerned.

Would I rather have done mass market publishing and let a publishing house take all this work on? You better believe it. I'd rather have an editor catching all my mistakes than having to do it myself. I'd rather have a team of creative people working on my cover than just my husband and myself. But if I'm going to be honest with myself, going through an agent and a publishing house takes years to accomplish. You're going to be rejected. That's just the way of life. At the time I decided to publish on my own, I wanted feedback and I wanted it now. Believe me, I got it.

Should you self publish? That's up to you. If you don't mind doing your own advertising and formatting your own manuscript, go for it. You'll have to put up your own money for a lot of things. All the work falls on you. If that's okay, go for self publishing.

But if it's not, write your query letter and be prepared for a long haul. I'm doing the round with agents this year to see if anyone wants my work right now. But I'm not going to stop self publishing until I have to. I might not have more than a local fan base right now, but I have one. I can actually say that I've sold copies of my novel and that even with the formatting errors, Prophecy was a hit locally. The feedback was instrumental in my decision to keep going with my writing.

If I hadn't self published, I wouldn't be where I am right now. For me, that says a lot. But I had to work for it. Do you want to do all the work for it? That's up to you.

Now it's back to business. I've been doing a lot of work on things in my personal life, which has made it easier for me to get back to my professional life and start writing again. But about a week and a half ago, I ran into a snag. I like to think of it as a character messing up my plot.

In Legacy, I'm setting up so many things that are going to come to pass in later novels and now that I know that, I'm trying to make the most of every single conversation and scene in Legacy so the reader isn't in the dark later on when I reveal things that are extremely important. As I write these scenes and conversations though, I find that some of the situations don't lend themselves to the plot itself. A character is messing up the flow of the story line and it's annoying.

So what do you do when this happens to you? I'm fortunate in that I have a continuity expert and plot partner to bounce ideas off of. When I mess up something, he catches it and reels me in. Then it's back to the drawing board, which means hitting the library. I had to do more research on the culture of Scotland in 1785 to understand what my character would really do. I had to think about the nature of the character himself and find the true motive behind his actions. Then I had to rewrite two pages to make it fit in with reality.

When you go back to the source and think about what a character would really do or what a situation would honestly call for, it's not as bad as you think it is. Also you want to remember one key thing: you can't kill off a character when it nullifies your entire plot. Sure, killing the character off makes the original problem go away, but then you're stuck when you need that character to come back. Or you can resurrect them, but no one will buy it.