Hi! You're at the blog of Mary Sisson--presumably you got here from my Web site, marysisson.com, but if you didn't, go there and check it out!
I'm a writer who is self-publishing a number of books. Right now, there are sample chapters for my science fiction novel Trang up on my Web site. Hopefully later today the Amazon e-book version will be ready, and I will link to it there and (ETA) here.
I also plan to have what my mother would consider a proper book--a print-on-demand physical book. I'm hoping to have that ready by the end of February, but that may be unrealistic. Amazon makes it super-easy to upload to the Kindle store--well, I did have to double-space the paragraph breaks because I couldn't get them to indent, but that's more a testimony to my technical ineptitude than anything else--and it's totally free for the writer. For a physical book, however, the text itself needs to be laid out, and you need a cover. One option is to have them do it, which is fairly expensive and would be a brand-new expense with each book. The other option is to do-it-yourself: I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for everyone, but I did spend many years working in publishing, and although I am really, really not visually adept, all-text books are relatively simple to lay out. So I'm going to pony up for Adobe Acrobat and see where I get--this may turn into The Revenge of the Art Department, but so be it. Given my lack of spelling ability, Trang is probably already The Revenge of the Copy Edit Department, so I might as well let everyone have their satisfaction against us prima donnas in Editorial.
So, that's the short-term schedule for now. Longer term, the second book in the Trang series, Trust, is slowly but surely making its way through my editing and revision process. I wrote a draft of it that I thought didn't really work, got sidetracked for a friggin' year on a large freelance project (that shouldn't be an issue any more), and then gave it a major restructuring, probably trashing a good 30K words and adding another 40K. Now it seems to have good flow, and I'm tweaking it and will probably give it to friends to read over fairly soon. Hopefully that will be out later this year.