On August 5th it was 1 year since I've self-published SIREN SUICIDES, my first novel, well, first trilogy that was really one novel but then it grew too long and I had to cut it into three books and one day I will edit it down and republish it as one. Anyway. I can't believe it's been a whole year already. One moment I feel like I've published it only yesterday, another I feel like it's been a decade. It seems I'm so far away now from where I started and I have learned so much and have yet so much to learn that the only way to do this is to SELF-PUBLISH MORE BOOKS, DAMMIT. And I need to write more books to self-publish more, and I will, I will. 8 more novels already planned. Maybe I should do a blog post about them all. In the meantime, there are a few very curious things that I have learned that can perhaps make your self-publishing road smoother (organized in no particular order, or, I should say, organized in the order they popped in my head):

1. Grammatical and other mistakes never end.

There is something to be said for the prowess of traditional publishing houses, and that is years and years of experience and many many eyes poring over manuscripts and weeding out everything that seems unreadable and making it readable, which we forget about when reading books because we're so used to clean stories. I go through my final draft myself many times, and my editor goes through them many times, and my formatter, and then I do it again, and still readers keep sending me mistakes they have found, overlooked. Little silly things, like "craw" instead of a "crow", things that three people have somehow overlooked. What I have learned from this is that it's my responsibility to make my books clean first and foremost. As a self-published author I can't be sloppy, and so I stocked up on grammar books and am paying more attention to writing cleanly.