Day 2: Some ramblings about being a self pub (requested by dracavia)

Sorry if this isn't very coherent, I made the mistake of not writing it in advance and I'm going to see Coriolanus today, so you can guess where my brain is :).

The exact request was: Anything on your experiences as a self-publishing author.

That leaves me a lot of scope and I've talked about several things before, so I've tried to come up with something new.

When I first set out to be a self-pub I tried to compartmentalise my author identity for the different genres I write. I had one for the books I write with Soph, one for the adult tiles and one for the YA/NA books. I think this was a huge mistake.

I can understand why some people would want to compartmentalise, but for me, it just didn't work. The whole situation just over complicated things. I have since gone 'screw it' and just advertise everything everywhere. I always make sure that my books with adult content are marked as such so I don't think there should be any confusion. I still use a nom de plume for my adult books because it makes it easier to distinguish them, but it's not exactly much different from my real name and I throw links to all my books at all my places on the web.

For reference, my books that have Tasha D-Drake on the front are my adult titles (and by that I mean they have explicit sex) and all those with Natasha Duncan-Drake are for a more general audience.

I decided a long time ago on a simple rule: never put anything out there I would be ashamed to stand up and admit was mine. It's something I try to live by in general and I feel the same way about my books.

I compartmentalised my different books to begin with because I thought that's what you did and I know some people are very successful that way, but it didn't work for me. The reading public has a brain and I like to credit them with being able to use it, so I suspect they can tell the genres of my books quite easily. I'm not saying this will work for everyone, or that it should, but it does for me.