ABOUT


From Manuscript to (e)Book: Your Self-Publishing Adventure Guide

About

Hello, my name’s Sarah Ettritch, and I’m a self-publisher. In April of 2008, I launched a lesbian speculative fiction site called Rymellan Fiction. I wasn’t intending to publish the series I used to post there, but occasionally someone would ask where they could obtain the stories in print, and I had to tell them they couldn’t. I decided I wanted to change that answer.

Since the stories used to be available on the web, I went the self-publishing route. To be honest, I would have chosen that path regardless, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. For several years I’d hung around on a couple of the self-publishing Yahoo! groups, since I enjoy writing and figured I’d probably end up publishing something someday.

After researching subsidy publishing and the various ways one can self-publish, I decided to form my own publishing company, and that’s when Norn Publishing was born. I released Rymellan 1: Disobedience Means Death in January 2010, using Lightning Source as the printer and distributor. I learned how to format the book for the Kindle and how to create ePub files, and so the book is also available for the Kindle and various other eBook readers, including the iPad. In October 2010, I released my second book, The Salbine Sisters.

I’m Canadian, and I found that information about how to accomplish some tasks in Canada, such as obtaining ISBNs and CIP data, was available, but not all in one place. At the time, I was blogging at my personal website (still do), so I did a series of posts about self-publishing in Canada, though much of the information is applicable everywhere. After I released my book, I continued to blog about publishing-related topics, since publishing is undergoing a bit of a revolution right now.

My personal blog grew unfocused, so I decided to create this blog and focus on self-publishing here. When I created the blog, I moved all the publishing-related posts I made on my personal blog to this one.

I hope you find the information here useful.