[ellenoc]

I am totally self-published. I did pursue the traditional route for some time, and in those years my book won the mystery division of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Annual Colorado Gold Contest. The editor who judged the finals was interested in it, but of course by the time the book was ready to submit, that small pub was out of business. An agent was interested, but almost the first thing she said was my title had to be changed to something with "Murder" or "Death" in it to identify it as a mystery. Also I couldn't say that my protag "tugged" on a dog's collar because that smacked of abuse. That kind of experience gave me pause. Then I was fortunate to belong to a very good critique group for several years. In that time 2 of the group got traditional publishing deals. Watching them and what was involved, I realized I'd rather never be published than go through that. The successful one of the two (at least he's now got several more books pubbed - Troy Cook), spent more than his advance on a p.r. person. Called book stores all over the country asking them to stock his book, traveled a lot to book conferences, smoozed people there, did book signings, etc. I absolutely am not going to do that kind of stuff and I know it, so I stopped writing for several years and just forgot about it.

I got a Kindle 2 years ago, joined some Kindle specific lists and began to see posts about Amazon's DTP and indie publishing. So that's what I did, and as I said I'm very happy. The only marketing I've done is right from home via the Internet.

My guess is how happy you are with indie pubbing depends a lot on how realistic your expectations are. I went to enough writers' conferences, etc., to know that very few authors make much even when traditionally pubbed. If my book were to continue to sell the way it has for the first 7 weeks for a year, it would earn as much as I'd probably have gotten as an advance from a traditional publisher, and I'd be more than happy with that.

Dreams - When I first got my book up on Smashwords, a post on the Kindle forums said exactly what you did, that there are a lot of people who look on Smashwords but then buy on Amazon. My guess is that's what happened to me, because the first day or so there were 8 free downloads of my books on Smashwords, and I had 8 more sales than usual on Amazon.