Getting a Sponsor and Uploading to Debian
If you are not an accepted Debian Developer, you cannot upload to the Debian archive directly. You have to package your product and to ask for a sponsor on the Debian-mentors mailing list. A sponsor is a (generally) seasoned Debian developer who will check your packages and give you hints and support until he thinks they are ready to be accepted into Debian. Then he will upload them and they will be added to Debian. Once you've proved that you are able to create proper new packages and that you are willing to maintain them, you can also become a Debian developer, and maybe one day sponsor as well. However, this out of the scope of this document; if you are interested, you can read more about this subject in the Debian Developer's Reference.
A. Special Cases
Special Notes for Packages Outside Debian
If your package is not in Debian, and especially if it is closed-source or its license doesn't allow the redistribution of modified sources, you should pay special care to a few subtleties of packaging to make it as flexible as possible.
The Three Distributions of Debian
Debian is divided into three distributions: stable, testing and unstable. Whenever a new package is added, or an existing package is updated, it goes into unstable. Once it has been in unstable for ten days without revealing serious bugs, it automatically moves into testing. When the release manager decides it's time for a new release, he declares the testing distribution as frozen. This means that no new packages can be added, and no existing ones may be updated. Only outstanding bugs may be fixed. Once he thinks that testing is ready to be released, it becomes stable and a new testing distribution is added. Notice that the distributions are also referred to as branches.
This means that the three distributions (but especially unstable and stable) are sometimes very different, and that they may (and generally will) contain a different set of packages and different versions of the same packages. Thus a single package may not be installable on all distributions, or might not work on all of them. This is no problem when a package is in Debian, as it will automatically move from unstable into testing and finally together with the other packages it depends on, but it certainly is a problem for packages outside Debian.
As unstable and testing change very frequently (daily), it is very difficult to keep up with them, especially since not all users do a daily upgrade of all packages, but may upgrade only some the packages. It is thus best to target stable, but keeping a few things in mind to ease the installation on the other distributions.
For Debian have a look here -
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/distribute-deb/distribute-deb.html#adding-packages-to-debian
Mint uses Ubuntu repositories along with their own but I would imagine they have similar policies - unless it is LMDE which is Debian