Guest Post by Indie Author Gray!

Today we have a guest post by Gray! I'll let her introduce herself, but if you want to know more about her or read more by her (and you do) check out her blog, Writing is Life. (Because it's cool)

Hello! I am Gray Marie Cox and I am a self-published author, better known as an indie author. And today I am here to talk about self-publishing.

I chose to self-publish because of three things,

1. I am only a teen

2. Since I'm a teen, I'm pretty broke…

3. It was more convenient.

At first even self-publishing seemed far, far away and I thought I would never publish anything.  But then after farther research I decided at the age of eleven that I would self-publish my novella into an e-book using Amazon. So I did that, and my family and friends bought it, I got eight reviews, and I basically thought I was the hottest thing, ever… Until I turned fourteen, re-read my novella, and did a face palm. After that I decided to self-publish using Lulu.com, since it also published paperbacks. And as a non-tech savvy girl going onto a self-publishing website I was super intimidated. Luckily, there were video tutorials that showed you how! Unfortunately, I didn't (and still don't), have the best memory, so I ended forgetting most of that video and I had to guess on a bunch of things… there were tears. But an hour later I finished and got an email basically saying my books were in the process of being printed. And that, was officially one of the best moments of my life.

About a week later, our car was pulling up to our gate and it was pouring rain, and then my heart literally stopped beating for a second, because I saw a box sitting out there soaked through. And yes, those were my books. Lulu didn't even put a plastic bag over my box, so it was soaked through. Fortunately, when I cut it opened and was getting ready to cry over my ruined soggy books, I realized that they put a plastic bag over the books inside the box, not outside. My books weren't even cold. And that was officially one of the best moments of my life.

I guess what you can take for my experience is that publishing is not all sunshine and roses, but it's not that, that hard. I only spent fifty dollars publishing, but publishing was free, it was the ordering of the copies that cost money, and I ordered around twenty, soo...yeah!

I would encourage anyone to self-publish, because it's a really great experience, and you get the trill of holding your own book, and that's pretty awesome.