Happy days - my numbers' are here

Happy days, I hope. The road to self publication is long and winding but if you take it at your own pace, read the signs along the way, things can work out. In the past six months I've experimented with a few software packages, trying to find the one that could do all the things I needed for self publication on the internet. By trial and error, I arrived at Scrivener, a Mac friendly package that can turn out .epub, .mobi and PDF formats, to cover the demands of most of the digital publishing world.
Once a new thing appears - in the past ten years and most immediately, in the past three years, digital publishing has appeared - and many people said, a bit like 'the talkies', I suppose, that it would never catch on. Those same people are now pondering what type of tablet they should buy. But equally, as the success stories in self publishing have mounted, so have the number of services being offered to those wide eyed, punk pioneers who want to get their publication out there and in the hands of Kindle, iPad and God know how many other digital readers. They will take your writings from a scruffy, digital manuscript and turn it into a shining jewel which they will then launch, with a fanfare and a fair wind, onto the choppy seas of the world wide web. Of course, they've got to pick a pocket or two along the way so if you want that digital conversion done, you'll pay; if you want a cover design, you'll have to pay and so on and so forth.
I look on this whole self publication thing from a punk point of view. Back in the day there was no internet to market your products. Kids who took up guitars played their own shows and raised the money, through gigs and fanzines, to make their own records and when someone heard them, they passed it on, if they were good and then they got a following. Most importantly, they got paid.
Then along came the internet and a new phenomenon for those musical pioneers: a means to put out their music to like minded souls without ever having to bother with the 'music industry', the multi-million corporate giants who were all about profits and the bottom line and forgot about nurturing talent.
Musicians learned a very simple lesson; if you own it, you can sell it and the profits are yours. Colin Vearncombe, aka Black, is a case in point. He withdrew from the corporate music world but continues to make great music which he sells through his own website.
Now I've set up a website. My first book - Postcard from a Pigeon and Other Stories, a collection of 18 short stories - is completed and ready for publication. This morning my ISBN numbers arrived. These are (International Standard Book Numbers) and they're sold in batches of ten and more to publishers. So I've set up my own publishing imprint, Hannibalthehat Books and all my books will be published under that banner with the numbers I've bought.
Postcard will first be available on Kindle for 90 days, to avail of a special offer they've forwarded to those first time writers. So here's to happy days...