Rival Princes is now live! I've had people in touch with me to tell me they have it on their kindles, which is nerve wracking.

I've also had people ask if self publishing is difficult.

The actual act of self publishing is really simple - you just upload an image for the cover, and a document for the manuscript and then you tell Amazon a couple more things and make it live. You don't even have to have an ISBN for self publishing on Amazon.

The difficulty is finding people willing to actually buy and read your book.

So, because I want this book to do well I had to have a cover which matches the genre expectations. In this case it had to have two good looking guys and a certain colour palette. It also has to be gorgeous, so I hired a professional. I'm no designer, and I don't know the ins and outs of what the market wants in a sweet contemporary romance cover, so here we are. I do adore the cover...

I also hired a professional editor, because the last thing you want is for readers to be distracted by typos, repeated grammar errors or incorrect words. Sure, I've edited this book myself and I've had alpha and beta reader feedback, but there's always stuff that gets missed. I'm sure there's still a spelling error or something in there... My editor is also a developmental one, so she gave me some amazing feedback on how to make the scenes pop - varying action and thought and adding in some things I hadn't considered. Better book = happier readers.

And then there's the marketing aspect. I'm aware I have barely dipped my toes into the vast sea of online advertising. I'm doing things like updating here, sharing my book ad on gay romance facebook groups, doing a group takeover, blog posts and so on. I could be sinking a lot of money into Amazon and Facebook ads too, but I'm not quite ready to. Advertising can easily suck up a lot of time and money, and I'm leery of doing that - but also if I don't, then I might not reach a good audience. How do you decide what to do?

All of this is a huge learning curve, and I know I'll get better at it as I go. In the mean time, I just really hope people like exploring the Fairyland theme park, and fall in love with my boys the way I did.