I receive a lot of questions about self-publishing and operating a small publishing company. I do my best to answer these questions, and when more than one person asks the same question, I try to write a blog post to address it.

Asking questions here and there move independent publishers over one hurdle or another, but as we know, there are many hurdles to leap on the way from draft to book. It’s difficult in a ten minute conversation or an email to provide details about the entire journey.

So what’s the answer? Since I’m about to embark on yet another publishing expedition, I thought I’d take others along for the ride. Starting with a completed first draft, I’m going to document the steps I take to get from that unpolished manuscript to published paperback and eBook.

I’m going to call the series of posts Publishing 101: From Draft to Book in 30 Days.

Gulp. I hadn’t anticipated completing the project in 30 days (*see note below), but my fingers kept typing the title and that’s what they called it. Thinking about it, it’s not impossible to meet this goal. I feel confident with the characters, plot and structure in the story I’ve chosen to publish next: Fowl Summer Nights. The story is a little over 20,000 words long, easy enough to read in a few hours with no distractions.

Writers with longer stories or less time to dedicate to the steps will need more days to complete the journey of taking a draft to a book. No worries. I’ll save the posts and organise them on a page at this blog called Publishing 101. You’ll find the link in the menu at the top of this page.

Our Publishing 101 journey begins Monday February 3rd with the first post Evaluation and Aging Process.

*Note: I’m calling it 30 days, but it may run over that amount of time because it takes about two weeks or more to receive a proof from CreateSpace. I find reading the paperback proof vital to the overall editing process, so I never publish an eBook until I’ve read the paper proof.