Share Your Story: Publish Your Book

Back in the olden days, like 20 years ago, you needed a tree to publish a book. Even with a mighty tree, you'd still need to know how to make paper and it would have been really helpful to be friends with someone who could help you obtain a barrel of ink. Eventually you'd end up with something that Border's and Barnes & Noble would refuse to put on their shelves.

The publishing process has changed a little. Trees are much more relaxed, knowing that aspiring authors generally prefer sitting beneath them with a WiFi connection and a latte. Growing within sight of a Starbucks is perhaps the best gig a tree can ask for.

Stories get told online these days. Trees need not be mangled into physical books. Mere electrons assemble into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and epics, which can be more efficiently ignored by more people than any automated rejection system contrived by Borders and Barnes & Noble.

A veritable plethora of online services will step up to help you get published. Your work persists 'in the cloud', imparting a high-tech quality to what would have been idle scribblings on former trees just a few short decades ago.

Visit WriteMyMemoirs.com for a digital leg-up on your storytelling. They provide help. Writer's block can be swept away with a credit card. For only $49 you receive an interview and an outline from which to hang your tales. They also offer a ghost-writing service, which is not necessarily a real author skilled in the art of the scary story. if you have to ask, you probably don't need it. Feel free to skip the pay services and begin writing. A set of web pages leads you through crucial memoir-writing steps, such as the Dedication, The Title, and your email address. A following page prompts you to reduce your life to a set of bullet points: Early Years, Education, Military, Work Experience, and Retirement.

Providing this information generates a nifty timeline, in case you forgot how your life went. You will feel digitally important. The following page asks you to recall the people in your life: Ancestors, Siblings, Spouse, Children, Grandchildren, Extended Family, Friends/Mentors/Others. There's no place to enter the name of that insensitive lout from Barnes & Noble who rejected your manuscripts back in the 1970's. It doesn't matter anymore.

Your family timeline becomes a little creepy: each entry includes a name, and from/to dates. The dates become entries on the timeline. The 'to' date is labeled as "passed away.' If there's a way to remove that dubious milestone, we could not find it.

Should your inner child demonstrate superior language skills, consider online publishing to tell your story. Visit StoryJumper.com for creative tools aimed at kids' books. You can build a book from scratch or leverage over 8 templates, including Treasure Map, Food Fun, and Ocean Tale. Each template offers a running start toward a specific children's genre. You're provided with the first few pages, which you can edit or editorially approve. Subsequent pages offer direction through leading questions. It's up to you to complete the epic tale. Each page can contain graphics and text, at your direction. The site provides several hundred 'props' (graphics) for you to incorporate. You may also upload your own.

Clicking 'Save' on your epic tale brings up a brief registration screen asking for basic information. All you need provide is an account name, password, birth date, and email address. Expect to find a confirmation link in your inbox. The process is free, so far.

StoryJumper.com offers a comprehensive set of help pages explaining how to approach the development of a children's book. Character development, motivation, challenges, obstacles, climax, and closing are discussed. Mix in your own imagination, but the online tools provided by this site will send you on your way to becoming the next Beatrix Potter.

A hard copy of your tome will set you back $24.95. Be sure to wear out the spell checker before handing over your Visa card: a real book has no Undo Key. The site also facilitates onsite tree assassinations: you can download your book and print it on a local printer, at no charge.

Grace the world with your poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, screeds, and diatribes. Take us on a journey into the center of your mind. Amuse us with tales of your childhood. Booksie.com offers an outlet for your voluminous volumes of wordsmithiness. Split an infinitive or dangle a participle without fear of reprisal from your 7th grade Language Arts teacher. It's free and it's home to over 200,000 current compositions from people almost but not quite completely unlike you.

Build your portfolio, public or private, from a wide variety of formats: article, book, book review, essay, miscellaneous, novel, poetry, script, or short story.

Promote your output with tools provided by the site. Simply reveal the email addresses of your closest acquaintances: Booksie thoughtfully spams them with heartfelt invitations. You can also pump up your volume via Easy Link buttons at the bottom of each composition: Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and a few others are available. The list is not comprehensive, but not everyone deserves the benefit of your writing anyway.

We conclude that online writing proliferates unabated. Storage space in the cloud appears to be virtually unlimited and everyone wants a taste. Share your story: publish your book electronically before someone else steals it. We all have a story, but so does everyone else.