I posted some chapters and started to get readers, and this encouraged me to write more chapters. The comments were good, and I got to one thousand hits. Wow, I celebrated. A peculiar feeling to know these people were looking and some were reading chapter by chapter. Votes were coming in. And some readers were following me!
It was the motivation to write another chapter, then another. Soon I was writing one chapter each week and watching the reaction (I could see how quickly people logged onto the story after posting a chapter - sometimes it was immediate). I felt like a hero!
And several months later I had finished the story. Oh my god, the number of hits went over 500K. I told myself to calm down. Drilling through the stats, I could see that 22,800 had read the first three chapters, 13,000+ had got over half way through the story, and 5.200 had finished the book. Also, 383 comments had been posted, mainly complimenting my story. But these were readers who were reading for free. I thought to myself, could I take this story from an amateur draft, to a professional standard, so that people would buy it?
The traditional route to publication is to get a literary agent, who will immediately recognise my talent (!) and present my manuscript to a publishing company. They then print it, promote it, launch it ... big hit.
I made plans to get an agent who would represent me and sell my book to a publisher. I bought a publication listing all the agents in the UK.
YOU ARE READING
Publish
Non-FictionThis is a diary of my efforts to publish. It is not a ''how to'' lesson on getting a book published. Nor does the diary offer any advice to ''would be'' authors. It is a diary, a very brief diary, on what I am doing to get my story published, beginn...
