Twenty eleven is the Year of the Chicken around here. The chicken coop is finally finished. Just the fencing is left, and then we can bring some hens home. These will be free-range chickens, with both a fenced-in pasture and a 30’x30′ predator-proof pavilion. There will be no tiny cages for these gals.

The girlfriends, we already call them. Kimber, Danielle, Leah and Anna — the names of our 19-year-old son’s girlfriends since Kindergarten. We are excited about having chickens as much for their interesting company as for their eggs and poop for the gardens. We are full of love and enthusiasm for them, much like how I feel about the novella I finished two months ago. It is a rich yellow-yolked egg of a story with a hard brown shell, and I am a free-range writer who has tasted self-publishing after years of submitting books and essays to big publishers and waiting quietly for months, usually for a form rejection…and thinks it’s something to cluck about.

Self-publishing feels sexy. Empowerment does its thing, the body responds, and I feel reborn. Chickens are a reminder of fertility according to the book Animal Speaks. When I first finish a book, I’m proud of it. I’m in love with it. This is no time for submission. It’s time to tell the world!

My egg, a novella entitled A Bear Tale, is impossible to market in the mainstream. At 47 pages, it’s too long and too short. So I was only briefly tempted to try. I sent it to the local newspaper for possible serialization and to a literary magazine. Both rejections.

Publishing has changed since my first book was published by Houghton Mifflin in April, 1986. My Apple IIe and dot matrix printer cost me $3,000 and changed my life, freeing me from the typewriter. I published five more children’s and young adult novels (HMCo and Scholastic) and a nonfiction book about writing (Warner and Blue Heron) over the next six years, and then I hit a wall. Publishing was really changing then, with the buyouts and Rupert Murdoch, and I was changing and wanted to write something besides children’s novels. One of my books had a horrible jacket, I lost several editors, and I waited months for every step of the process. It was like industrial chicken farming. I was far removed from the full process of my creations. The result was weak-shelled, pale-yolked eggs; disease; and unhappy chickens. Not sexy. Writing for publication moved off of my plate for years.

 So now, a decade since my last mainstream publication, I have perversely written something I have to find another way to share. I posted the entire novella, nine chapters, as “Notes” on my Facebook page. I got lots of Likes and Comments. One commenter was novelist Brian Rush, who first planted the idea of self-publishing in my brain a year ago with his blog. He makes a great argument for us traditionally published, and I hadn’t forgotten.

Then I saw an 8-minute YouTube keynote by Matthew Stadler, co-founder of the small press Publication Studio, “What is Publication? Finding Your Audience in the 21^st Century.” He said there was a difference between publishing and publication. Publishing can be done on a $1500 machine by an unskilled person like himself. It’s merely the process of creating a readable book.

In contrast, he described publication as a relationship, a commitment, and a conversation, and how there are many publics, not just the “mainstream” that we all must look at. Publication, Stadler said, “is a political strategy – the creation of a public.” And, “This public, which is more than a market, is created by deliberate acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, the maintenance of a digital commons.”

My life was changed again. I wanted to make the book myself, not hand that power over. And I always was responsible for creating a big part of the public — speaking, signing, and teaching. I could set up a blog. Attend relevant events. Write articles like this one.

I sorted through the difference between Publication Studio-type self-publishing presses and other more “vanity press”-type outfits/rackets, both offering fee-based services, but hugely different in their approach. The latter advertises heavily, and charges for editorial services we writers really can do ourselves and within our writing groups. Writing groups have been the editorial process for years now.

Then there are the self e-publishing tools like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Smashwords where you can publish an e-book yourself and it costs nothing. That’s where I decided to start. I figured it couldn’t hurt. The author keeps all her rights, she can be distributed through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and she can sell the rights to a publisher later if she so desires.

I googled Publishing Novellas and got a link for Amazon’s KDP program called Kindle Singles, short e-pieces 30-90 pages, fiction and nonfiction. A Bear Tale would fit right in. Perfect for reading on an airplane. Which is where I read the novella A Farmer’s Daughter by Jim Harrison, and was inspired by the form. I had a vision!

It took me hours, but I did it. I’m in love, remember. And publishing an e-book on KDP isn’t that hard. I am a computer Fred Flintstone. But it’s an intuitive system, and the Community Forum model for questions and discussion works. KDP support is also excellent. They really did get back to me, and fast. My 27-year-old daughter wasn’t impressed with my e-cover — it took me four hours to put the title on the photo and I thought it looked damn good. She was shocked, and shared that she could do what I did in third grade. My 23-year-old daughter said that it was charmingly homemade, and that she knew I’d improve.

The KDP e-book edition of A Bear Tale hasn’t been selected, yet, as an official Kindle Singles. And after 3 weeks and just 5 sales, I published it at Smashwords where I could price it free. In the first 24 hours, the Smashwords edition had 61 downloads and over 125 visits. A big difference! Especially when I’m in the dissemination stage of marketing. Sharing my creation is its own kind of golden egg. I’m a happy hen. I’m cackling like a chicken: “B-k, b-k, b-k, book! B-k, b-k, b-k, BOOK!”

Publishing the print-on-demand version was a little tougher, but not because CreateSpace was more difficult. Formatting a book requires more Word knowledge than I had, and the Header/Footer/Page Numbering functions took my Neanderthal-self days to master. The key lies in Section Breaks. But don’t test me. I love the little “What’s this?” buttons. I click them all. The print cover looks great, even to the younger generation. I love templates. You, too, can do this. You can.

The entire self-publishing experience has cost me a total of $45 – six bucks for the proof (including shipping) and I chose to buy CreateSpace’s Pro Plan distribution option ($39.00). I chose the “cheepest” price I could for both the e-book (KDP $2.99, Smashwords FREE) and the print version ($6.10) and still I make two dollars on every book sold. But money is far from my main motivation, which is making something I love and sharing it. I want to write another novella so I can do this all over again.

No longer is publishing all about the big houses and their bestsellers. It’s about thousands of us free-range writers and our eggs, Apples, and BlackBerries roaming the web, gathering on porches and coffee houses, and claiming our rightful perches in the public domain.

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[Christi notes that you can catch up with more of her writing on her new blog. –ed.]