Read Local! Hurray for the Indie Authors!

Supporting Local businesses has always been a terrific way to support the community you live in. 

Now you can expand on that concept and help support the local authors in your area.  The library in my community is doing just that and hosting an "Indie Author Showcase" and providing a fair to allow local authors to showcase their talents and sell their works directly to the public. 

The event will take place on Thursday, May 5 from 3pm-5pm as noted in this flyer. It will be held outdoors right next to the New Richmond Library on E. 1st Street. Looks like we will have good weather for the event. (knock on wood)

I recently got my new revised edition of my book about the National Park Service.  I was happy that I received it in time for the May 5th showcase.  I am very pleased with how it turned out and I hope potential readers of the book will be interested as well. Wish me luck! 

This is the first book I have published with IngramSpark.   Previously I published three other books utilizing Create Space self publishing (via Amazon).  I switched to this publisher after speaking with several independent bookstore owners and found out that several have a shared disdain for Kindle/CreateSpace publishing (more immediately recognized as "publishing via Amazon". )  Now in defense of my previous book publishing, I was not aware of the fact that Amazon was the Devil.  (see my previous blog: Sympathy for the Devil, from last September found at:  https://julieetta1982.blogspot.com/2021/09/sympathy-for-devil.html   It is truly amazing how much can happen in a matter of 6 or 7 months.  I am pleased with the way my new book looks, but learning how to market the book and getting it into the hands of interested readers brings new challenges.

I emphasize with the independent bookstores.... I truly do and I can understand their attitudes toward the Amazon business model. Nevertheless the plight of authors needs to be considered as well. I sincerely hope I have made a wise decision to switch to a publisher that works more in conjunction with independent booksellers.  Yet it remains to be seen if  my new choice of publisher supports independent authors.  Time will tell and I am trying hard to be optimistic. 

 My attitudes about writing and also publishing really can ebb and flow.  One minute I am optimistic about sharing my work with others, then there are days when I want to just give up. If this were a regular job....I probably would have quit or been fired several times over. Oh, well...the nature of the beast. Nobody ever said that writing was easy.  Even Hemmingway had an interesting take on that:

So I keep writing and realizing that I write because I want to, not because I have to. JES