Happy New Year! This is the perfect time to begin a new project. Write that memoir. Develop your recipe book full of family favorites. Share your mystery story about five-armed space aliens and river-laced planets. Get it started.

Sometimes authors are concerned about the money involved with publishing. Getting your book out into the world can be wholly FREE. Yes, FREE. Whether you choose to go with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or several other options, you can load your PDF or Word DOC of your manuscript online wholly for FREE. Your content is then available for people to buy in ebook format. If you wanted to make a paperback, the cost to get copies in your own hands is just the printing cost. So, for example, a typical novel might cost you $3.50 printing, plus shipping, to get a version into your hands. There is no setup / listing / maintenance costs involved.

Yes, certainly, if you wanted to pay someone to edit your book, or design a cover, or so on, you could choose to pay them. But I know authors who have paid $5,000 or more to a company when all that company did was take the author’s Word document and load it into Amazon (for free), plus add a free stock-photo cover. There’s no reason to pay $5,000 for a ten-minute free activity.

If you’re in the process of thinking about a book, please contact us. We can get you pointed in the right direction. If you want to pay $1000 to an editor to fix your typos, that is wonderful! If you have a favorite illustrator you want to pay $500 to so they custom-design the perfect cover for you, fantastic. We will help you navigate to know which costs make sense to incur and which don’t.

Above all, write. Write, write, write. Never let concerns of “how will I pay to get it published” hold you back. We are here to help you. Whether you are eight or eighty-eight, your voice matters. The world needs to hear your stories. Our modern world makes that reality a mouse-click away.

This article was first published by Lisa Shea in the January 2022 issue of the Boston Mensa Beacon.