Idea: #steemfirstpublishing cirle.

If you write e-books and/or dead-tree books, you will know there are quite a few choices to be made for publishing. Do you seek to get published by a traditional publishing company? Do you go the self-publishing route? If you go trad-pub, do you try the top publishing companies that you know will market the hell out of your publication but get so many submissions that yours getting through is about as likely as winning €1000.- with one of those scratch card lottery tickets, or do you go with one of the many small niche market publishing houses that have a high acceptance rate, but expect you to do most of the marketing? When going the indie publishing road, do you go exclusive with a channel that happens to be a big player where you live? Or do you go multi channel, publishing your work on as many channels as you can? Do you use a POD service? Or stay e-book only? Do you use beta readers? Or hire a professional editor? Do you hire an illustrator? A cover artist? A publicist? Or do you buy a few for-dummies books or watch a few udemy courses and set off to do all these things yourself?

One question not many authors will ask though is:

How does STEEM fit into the publishing game?

After all, STEEM is about proof of brain. About original content. But so, at least in the minds of many authors, is e-book publishing. If you publish your work, all of your work, on the STEEM blockchain, you might make a few euros pounds or dollars from the platform, but after that your work will be public and nobody in their right minds will want to buy an e-book copy if they can just read it for free. At least, that is the way many authors seem to think.

I want to propose this kind of reasoning is flawed. People out for a freebie are not the kind of people who would buy your book if it wasn't free. There are many places where free books are available for side-loading these days. Chances are even, your book will be available in a pirated form on at least one shady side as we speak.

The one thing that publishing your work, your whole work, will hurt is your ability to opt for tradpup, at least for the marketing-included top publishing companies out there. You might manage to convince a small publishing house that you published with before to accept STEEM as an alternate publishing path, but for the most part, the choice to publish your whole work on STEEM will push your other publishing into the indie publishing realm.

There is an other path, and a path chosen by quite a few great STEEM authors, and that path is serializing old already published work after the revenue stream from different channels has dried up, and that is OK, but not as good IMHO as posting original content on STEEM and publishing in other ways later. After all, STEEM is meant to be about original content, and while the serialized book is original within the web scope, it could be even more original if it were published on STEEM first.

For me, this happened by accident. When I joined STEEM, I had published a few novelettes and after a previously supportive indie publishing group on GoodReads went sour, I had, mostly for health reasons, completely given up on writing and publishing. I have a rather complex health history and part of it is strongly bound to me taking stress avoidance as a way of life, because, and I am not exaggerating, my lack of ability to cope with certain types of stress can be correlated with all but one major health events in my life.

When I joined STEEM I had an incomplete novelette with cover art that was laying there without a plan. Then, what started as a series of flash-fiction type short prequel stories for my novelette ended up being the start of a reshape of my novelette into a STEEM-first novel. Some of my chapters, with the support of @curie and @blocktrades ended up doing amazingly well. Well enough for me to crowd source my editing with a number of beta reading contests, and well enough to find and fund a STEEM illustrator to illustrate my work. Even well enough to now fund most of the Spanish translation, that I am currently posting periodically on the STEEM blockchain.

I was recently reminded of my GoodReads ordeal when an inflated-ego self-important douchbag falsely accused me of all kinds wrongdoings for inviting a talented author to a contest I am currently running to promote #creativecoin tag usage by fiction authors, and to help me with a story I am currently stuck on, for my next STEEM-first project. A series of short nutrition-inspired stories.

This incident made me realize once more what an amazing platform STEEM is. No need to listen to hot-headed self-appointed arsewipes of mods that would destroy a hard build reputation with a few strokes of a pen without as much as a fact check. Just mute the wanker and be done with it. Everybody is a mod here in their own right.

A golden balance between the zero mod zero checks and balances that makes indie publishing have such a wide range of quality artifacts (ranging from amazing works of non-templated fiction that in tradpub could only get published if the author's name was Doris Lessing, down to outright crap that no editor could salvage), and the god-like gatekeepers of big tradpub publishing houses. We don't need mod aproval by any single mod on STEEM, we get that from the masses.
At least in the English language.

With STEEM and #creativecoin being such great places for writing to hatch in the area between zero mods and omnipotent mods, at just the right level to make great works stand out, I feel many authors don't appreciate the importance and potential of publishing STEEM-first.

If you are an indie published author, or a small publishing house author with a close and friendly relationship with his or her publisher, who uses STEEM and/or #creativecoin as well. Please give going STEEM first for your next writing project some serious thought.

If you do make that (brave) step, I would like to suggest we, the select group of #steemfirstpublishing authors, start using a new tag for our work. A tag that distinguishes serialization of existing work and distinguishes the just-for-fun scriblings we have no intention to ever publish anywhere else, from real #steemfirstpublishing material.

What I want to suggest is we define a loose circle of #steemfirstpublishing authors who try to help each other out on our journeys. No mods, no tribes, no voting, no special positions. Just users of the #steemfirstpublishing tag who try to help each other out.

Also, those STEEM authors of you who haven't published any e-books yet, and those e-book authors who are new to STEEM and/or #creativecoin, I would like to ask that if you plan to later publish your work as e-book and/or dead-tree book, that you use the #steemfirstpublishing tag and ask for assistance on any aspects you lack experience in.

Right now #steemfirstpublishing is a lonely tag. I would like to invite all Amazon/Play/Kobo/Smashwords/iBooks/etc authors on STEEM and #creativecoin and any small publishing house authors, to give the concept some consideration.

Try it for one project. Publish original content you plan to publish as e-book on STEEM first. Use the tag. Let us support eachother and make the concept grow.