Kulski Self-Publishing

 

In July of 2011 while travelling with my wife in Madagascar, I read her airport potboiler Bone Vault that was a vaunted NY best seller written by Linda Fairstein, a NY city public prosecutor and writer of crime novels. Bone Vault was a badly written and self-indulgent story about a female NY prosecutor who solved bizarre murder cases at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of NY and attended gala events while handsome city cops and ambitious lawyers fell in love with her or were smitten by her charm, intelligence and beauty.  This NYC best seller was so mindless that it inspired a retirement challenge for me. Writing crime novels couldn’t be too difficult, could it, if Bone Vault really was a best seller? Surely, I could write a better and more interesting story than that much too obvious Bone Vault? Aren't New Yorkers supposed to be highly intelligent, worldly and sophisticated people? And so at the age of 64 years, in my retirement, I set out to write my first novel, set in my hometown, Perth in Western Australia, the pimple on the arse-end of the revolving globe. First I scribbled out the plot in a notebook over a few weeks of excited and inspired work and then for the next few years I slowly researched and developed the scribbles into a film script. Knowing that the film script would never be turned into a movie I transformed it into a novel. Having finished the full draft of the crime novel by the end of 2013, the task now was to get it published. Here was the great difficulty. How do you at the age of 66 years of exhausting life publish your first novel? Do you have to send it to every publishing house listed on the Internet or do you find yourself an agent to find a publisher for you? I concluded that neither of these two processes was suitable for me. It would have taken too many years of my life dealing with the rejections and pursuing unreliable or fee-demanding contacts for services denied. It seemed a far too daunting task to pursue for an old guy aspiring to be a first time author. The alternative was to self publish or find a vanity publisher. And so it was, after seeing an advertisement on self-publishing, my wife indulged me with a birthday present and purchased an Xlibris self-publishing package in April of 2014. The rest as they say is history, with the crime novel China Heist by J. K. Kulski published and released on the worldwide Internet market in October of 2014.  Unlike Fairstein’s Bone Vault (published in 2003 by Pocket Star Books, Scribner, Kindle, Little, Brown, Sphere and Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing ebook), the China Heist crime novel wasn’t a best seller and it never reached the sales that were anticipated or dreamt of, but the process of writing and publishing was fun. Those few who I knew and read my book gave me positive feedback and told me that they enjoyed it and thought that it would make for an exciting movie. This experience encouraged me to write and self publish my second novel, a historical novel and biography about Leonardo da Vinci. The self-publishing providers CreateSpace and Ingram Spark released Leonardo da Vinci: The Melzi Chronicles by J. K. Kulski onto the world stage in July of 2017.

 

Press the adjoining pdf button to download a summary of how J. K. Kulski used six different publishing resources (Xlibris, CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing, iBooks, and InTechOpen) for indie authors to self-publish.