Thank you, everyone, so very much for your kind thoughts and time taken to reply to my question. I'm not so interested in the financial aspect of things - what I do care about is getting my songs, if they are good enough, to be heard by more people. Right now, I'm relying on word of mouth to spread the word and, although I'm happy with how it's going, I'd like to take it up a notch if at all possible.

To that end, therefore, I will definitely follow your advice and research every suggestion given. I am right now looking at the NSAI website and - on a first glance - it looks very promising, though I of course need to take my time with all of this and digest it properly. I will also, without a doubt, buy and optically devour the book Mr Brown suggested, above.

Again, the reason I want to do this is certainly not for the money; but I want to get my songs "out there" and, crucially, test myself against the best - because that way I can improve my own songwriting skills more. It feels a little demoralising to write what I personally think of as good songs and have them sit in my SoundCloud account, gathering dust - I want to see just how good or bad they objectively are, and - if they're not good enough at THAT standard, come back and write even better. While it would be nice to be appreciated financially, of course - that's not crossing my mind right now, of course.

Again - THANK YOU for taking the time to point me in the proper direction - really appreciated!

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