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Silver Spring, MD
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Stories To Tell is a full service book publishing company for independent authors. We provide editing, design, publishing, and marketing of fiction and non-fiction. We specialize in sophisticated, unique illustrated book design.

Stories To Tell Books BLOG

Delving into the Publishing World

Sarah Hoggatt

You’ve been working on some writing and are considering the possibility of self-publishing down the road, but it looks like a large, unmanageable jungle. You’re not sure where to even start and thus ask a question I often hear, “How did you start publishing?”

Image courtesy of hmg on Pixaba

This is a story that goes back to when I started writing in junior high school as a way to express the feelings I didn’t have the courage to say aloud. I wrote pages to God to share all the angst in my heart and poems about the world and those I loved within it. It was a way to get things out and to process my thoughts. These habits of journaling and writing poetry stayed with me through high school and on into college. When I was particularly proud of a poem I wrote, I would share it with those around me.

After graduation, friends told me they wanted to read more of my poetry so I collected it all and made three copies to circulate around. It was not enough and I was looking for a solution when I met another poet at the Salem, Oregon Art Fair’s Author Table. We hit it off and she extended an invitation to visit her and find out more about self-publishing. At her house, she told me about ISBN numbers, editing, illustrators, copyright, and obtaining a Library of Congress Number. She told me where she had her books printed and showed me more of her own work.

Being poor, I didn’t have much money to pay for such a project so I asked the people who wanted me to publish if they would be willing to buy the book before it was printed. They were. I added some of my own money, hired an artist friend for the illustrations, and recruited another friend who designed a church newsletter to help me layout the pages. We spent hours and hours in a small room figuring out all the little and not so little problems of laying out a book and when we were finally done, I took the files to a copy shop to have the books printed.

It was a fantastic feeling to hold a book in my hands that I wrote and I am still immensely proud of my much younger self for opening up her writing to the world and for having the courage and determination to see the project through at a remarkably young age. People liked the book and with the extra copies I sold, I had enough money to reprint a second edition. With the money earned from that printing, I printed the second book and so on. Each time I print a new book, whether it’s one I wrote or someone else’s work, I learn something new. I would, of course, make some different choices if I went back to do it again, but I would never tell myself not to publish the book. Even as amateurish as that first book looked, I would still give myself the go ahead for it has meant something to the people who read it – far more than I would have ever thought possible when I first wrote it.