I'm really doing it: self-publishing

So I mentioned in my last post that I am going to venture into the self-publishing world this year. It's sort of a scary step for me because it's unknown territory, but I am also really excited about this. With everything else that's changing in my life, I figured I might as well try something else new. If it works, it works and if it doesn't, well you only fail if you don't try.

So here's the announcement:

Previously I was going to seek a traditional publisher for my poetry collection, She Wasn't Allowed to Giggle. Instead, it's going to be my first self-published work. I've talked to a lot of fellow writers and have been reading a lot about it, both sides of the argument. There is a constant message about self-publishing for every writer: You are taking a huge risk with it but at the same time you don't know if it will work unless you try it out.

I might be getting in over my head these days- Spellbound by Fire is being released Sept. 15 and the sequel is still on it's first draft. Now I have a wedding to plan, a book to market and soon a self-published work to put a lot of resources into. But I feel ready for the challenge.

She Wasn't Allowed to Giggle is a collection of poetry I have been working on for a long time. It is a compilation of poems I wrote throughout my teenage years when my family was still living with domestic violence and in the years following, including some very recent pieces. I'm excited because it won't only be poetry. I am going to experiment with putting in some old journal entries that will accent what the poems are about and give it a voice of a little girl who was bound to silence and scared for so many years but has broken free of the darkness. It is something I have wanted to publish for a long time.

A preview of some of the poems that are going into She Wasn't Allowed to Giggle are at: http://laviniathompsonauthor.wordpres...