Books by Randy Cockrell

Publishing is in a state of free-for-all right now. It might be that readers don’t notice it. They may notice that their favorite author is only available as a Kindle down-load, never found on their local bookstore’s shelves. Perhaps they notice that they cannot get any of the stories their favorite author wrote years ago or that finally, their favorite author has made their backlist available on Amazon.

Writers, though, are all too aware of what’s going on in publishing. I’m a new author, having put my first book out in August of 2012. I went indie, that is, independently published, or self-published. It was still relatively new in 2012 and many of my mentors on Forward Motion were already well into the process. They had a wealth of information on self-publishing and with their help it was pretty easy to do. As a new author, I wasn’t aware that there was a “stigma” attached to self-publishing. If I had, I wonder if I would have jumped on the bandwagon so quickly?

Sure, I was afraid when I hit the submit button back then. I mean, I put a lot of my heart and soul into that book. All of the usual fears crept into my mind. Did I catch all of the errors when I did my multiple rounds of edits? Will people like it? Will it sell? Am I just embarrassing myself? Oh yeah, the self-doubts are there.

I’ve been through the process several times now. I still get the same wave fear with every book I put up. There’s no validation in indie publishing as there is in traditional publishing. I submit stories to various magazines and publishing houses. Same waves of fear but so far, I haven’t had any takers on the traditional side of publishing. It’s understandable. They get thousands of manuscripts a year and can only publish a few. But I can imagine how gratifying it must be to have someone in the business say, “Hey, I love it. Let’s talk about getting this published.” That’s validation that your work is good enough to sell.

Sure, on the indie side, validation comes from sales numbers but getting discovered by the reading public is tough. There are hundreds of new books published every day. How do I know if my books aren’t selling because of bad writing or poor marketing? There’s no way to know. There again, fear and doubt raise their ugly heads.

All I know is that I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to keep indie publishing. I’m going to keep submitting stories to magazines. I’m going to ignore those nagging fears and doubts.

Speaking of those fears, my newest novella, First Encounter: A Brown Rain series book releases today September 18th! I’m pretty excited about it. You can buy at: Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Smashwords today!

The Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour is sponsored by the website Forward Motion (http://www.fmwriters.com) . The tour is you, the reader, travelling the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. There are all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s always something new and different to enjoy. If you want to get to know the nearly twenty other writers check out the rest of the tour at http://merrygoroundtour.blogspot.com!  Up next: Jean Schara!