I’ve been interested in writing and publishing for most of my life. I started exploring self-publishing in the 1980s, back in the days before the internet and before Amazon made it into the much easier venture that it is today. Back then, self-publishing meant taking your print-ready pages to a printer and buying huge orders of books that you hoped you could sell and at least make back your costs.
I started Paisley Publications in the mid 20-teens, first publishing a diet journal based on a complex spreadsheet I’d developed. Later I used the imprint to publish my book, The Gentleviewer’s Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
One’s mistakes tend to be very public when using online publishing to learn the tricks of the trade, but that is what I did. My first edition of the book had color illustrations and a plethora of embarrassing mistakes. The second edition was greatly expanded and fixed most of those mistakes, then a new revision to it finally, finally got the book to where it should have been from the start.
Too bad one cannot edit or remove the comments on one’s Amazon pages! Let’s just say, I learned self-publishing the hard way!
I keep this little publishing imprint around for any whimsical works I want to publish for myself or my friends and family, and have a second imprint, Ptolemy Press, for more serious works.
Want to talk about self-publishing projects? Here I am.
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