- A blog post in which I ramble about my publishing journey, self-publishing, some issues I take with with 'the industry', and the future - A tweet forced me to reflect today, and I wanted to share a bit, about myself, and my publishing journey so far, and maybe even some opinions thrown in there at the end. The tweet comes from @JAWeberEdits on twitter. I agree wholeheartedly with what she says here, and her thread (which I encourage you to read fully) got me thinking about self publishing, my personal journey, and the current climate in the industry regarding self-publishing and self-pubbed authors. I wanted to write down my thoughts. Because I actually think it might help me sort through some of my own reservations, doubts, and insecurities that I’ve found myself with over the last year. So allow me to write you a near-epic about me, my journey, and where I’m at now. Oh, and if you’re looking for a conclusion, you better leave now, because my journey is still very much a work in progress, and I’ve never been very good at wrapping my thoughts up into a nice little package. Buckle up because this going to be a ride. My writing journey has been a long one. I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid. My first finished novel was a horror story about a haunted house that I wrote in 5th grade for my Language Arts class. To this day, I am thankful that we had such a terrible LA teacher, because instead of teaching us, he would give us photocopies worksheets from a book, and after we were finished with it, we got to write. In the same class, I also started another novel, about a young girl who was, for some reason in some Alcatraz type jail(????), escaping but getting deserted on a desert island, and eventually being killed by a shark. I was... A strange kid. Even with my creativity sparked, it wasn’t until a book report in 8th grade, Shattering Glass by Gail Giles, and a direct email to the author of said book, that I considered being an author myself as a viable career choice. Gail gave me a lot of advice (write, write, write, stay away from vanity publishers, have something done before you’re 21 because they love to get em young), which I wasn’t able to follow it to the tee on my own personal journey, but her attention to me, at even 14 years old, always stuck with me and really motivated me through the years. I continued writing in my free time throughout high school, the concept of one day being a published author always sticking with me, and truly I think it’s one of the biggest reasons that I struggled with choosing secondary education (which I ultimately postponed and then forgoed all together to move to Sweden). There was only one creative writing course available in my hometown, and it was entirely online. I was not super interested in taking an online course, and when moving to live with my partner so we could make a life together became more of a priority, writing fell to the back burner as a hobby again while I got settled in an entirely new country. With an idea for a novel from high school under my belt, I started posting on Inkpop, a now extinct writing site hosted by HarperCollins, while I took Swedish language lessons. When it closed down, I shifted to Wattpad, where I saw my first bit of attention after starting the first draft of PULSE as a Nanowrimo project in 2012. (I am currently still on Wattpad, and also post WIP updates on TAPAS, shameless plug). By a bit I mean, PULSE had millions of views, and I had a pretty popping fandom for a brief blip in time. Many of those fans are still by my side now and it amazes me to this day.

It took a few more years and a couple redrafts (and some personal and professional “irl” dramas that give me mild PTSD just thinking about them :’D) before a full draft of PULSE was actually finished. The same year I finished PULSE, 2014, I moved onto WHAT THE FLOWER SAYS OF DEATH, finishing it also within 12 months of PULSE. While I was working on WHAT THE FLOWER SAYS OF DEATH, I was querying PULSE. To be exact, I had my eyes set on one indie publishing house in particular because they were publishing a friend of mine, and were run by a former member of Inkpop (Inkies will tell you that we are a tight knit family, even after all these years). I queried them, received a full MS request, and waited on their response for over a year. (I was really set on publishing with them…) After finishing WHAT THE FLOWER SAYS OF DEATH, I queried it to them also, but sent it along to a few other small publishing houses also.

When I received interest from one location on WHAT THE FLOWER SAYS OF DEATH, I informed my first choice publishing house, the one I was waiting on with PULSE, since they had previously requested a full. I also wrote a heartfelt letter to the acquisitioner about how I felt my books were a better fit for their house than the one that had shown interest, and that if they would have me, I would choose them over the other publishing house. This is what got both my novels finally signed in early 2016. At this point you can see that I’ve already been on the hook with this particular publishing house for about a year and a half. I am eager to get started. My press release is announced and I am scheduled for a 2017 debut. We’ve got a whole two years to make PULSE and WHAT THE FLOWER SAYS OF DEATH really sparkle and I’m excited. To save you the disappointment I went through I won't go into detail, but August 2017 rolled around and we hadn’t even fully gotten into edits yet on PULSE. 2017 wasn’t happening. I was tired, burned out from hyping for over a year while also being unable to actually offer my fans anything. Not a release date, not a cover, not an idea of when I’d be able to say more. Nothing. At this point I was going on 3 years of just waiting to put this novel out there for the fans who basically were the reason I got the confidence to query PULSE in the first place. I felt ashamed. I felt bad for being unable to give my fans what I believed they deserved. After all, they’d stuck with me for all this time. I just wanted to give them the novel that I’d been teasing them with for so many years. I just wanted to give them the ending that they stuck around for.

My contract with the publishing was ultimately dissolved in August of 2017, and instead of being upset, or dejected (OK, yes, of course I felt those things at first) I found myself feeling free. I had options again. I could do literally whatever I wanted with these novels again.

And I decided there, that I wanted to get them out to my fans as soon as possible. Deciding to self-publish and the “career killing” boogieman If you had told me a few years ago that I would be self-publishing my first two novels, I wouldn’t have believed you. For a long time, I had a very different opinion about self-publishing than I do now. Self-publishing was for amateurs. Populated by erotic fiction and “you can do it too” self help books from semi successful motivational speakers. Every self published fiction book I read had been terrible. Everyone I knew who tried to self publish totally failed. I knew the successes were out there, but it felt like ‘winning the lottery’ type situation and I was never really one to gamble. I fell victim to misconceptions that I think a lot of people still have to this day about self-publishing. That it’s for authors who can’t admit that maybe their work isn’t that good. It’s for a quick buck. That if you ever want to traditionally publish, stay as far away from it as you can. That it’s a black mark on your record. Hell, I remember a time when even posting your WIP on a place like Wattpad was looked down on. I was told my multiple people that I was killing my manuscripts chances because “no publisher will want to touch something that everyone has already read”.

Things are getting better. Self-publishing is becoming more accepted. More respected for the amount of work it takes and the fact that, for some, it is a real, viable path. But that old mentality is still lurking behind the comments about fanfiction to publication like “E.L James and Cassandra Clare are just outliers” and “nobody is going to look at that self-pubbed book unless you have serious numbers to back it up”, and creeps up into elitism when we say “It’s a Wattpad book” or “I would never share my work online, what if someone steals it?”. Listen, I could write a whole separate blog post about how damaging comments like this are to the self-publishing community, but I digress. The point I’m making is, I had internalized a lot of these opinions, and it made it so that self-publishing never even occurred to me as an option for a very, very long time.

My time being under contract forced me to reflect, though. Even before the contract had dissolved, I was having doubts about my decision to sign. In the time under contract I had made friends with a lot of content creators who were successful producing their art, content, stories completely on their own. I got to see their process, got to learn more about this whole freelancing thing, and I found myself a bit jealous of them and their freedom. They handled everything, they made all the decisions, and it seemed stressful and overwhelming at times, but also satisfying. Their success was all their own. Most of all, their communities were amazing, and I longed for that again. For a community. To be able to interact with people who were touched by my work. That, the interaction, was what I really wanted out of publishing. Especially in August 2017. When I was no longer under contract, it didn’t take long for the daydreams I had about ‘how I would do it’ if I decided to self publish, to come to fruition. I already knew quite a bit about social media management since I did it as part of my day job, as well as part of keeping my readership growth on Wattpad and TAPAS (it helped that my editor and good friend was also in school where some of her education involved social media management). I knew friends and fellow authors who were now freelancing; editors, beta and sensitivity readers, even amazing artists for the cover and promotional material. I already had the team I needed to make self-publishing a reality. I was still doubtful though, whether I would be taking seriously, if it would ruin my career and I would be stuck self-publishing for the rest of my life even if I changed my mind about it later. Fear mongering I had heard over the years and my own bias opinions of self-publishing made it hard for me to ever fully commit before then. But I was at the end of my rope. And I was ready to take the leap into the unknown.

And well, I guess you all know how that worked out if you’re reading this. I published both my manuscripts on my own (with hired help from my amazing friends who I now get to call collaborators also). I organized blog tours and advertising for both. I shipped out signed copies that I got to hold and love, and write the addresses of my amazing supporters by hand on each individual package. I got to share excerpts leading up. I got to send out review copies. I got to see the love for my manuscripts turn into the love for my books. Real, physical books that I made happen out of my own stubbornness and motivation. Most of all, I got to make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes, and experience the ups and downs of publishing all for myself, on my own terms.

And it’s been amazing. Every damn second of this experience has been beyond my expectations, and if the fear mongering is true and I’ve killed my traditional publishing career by going self-published, I would be OK with that. Because it was the decision I made, and I own that. I made the decision to self publish, fully knowing that I was possibly taking a leap that I wouldn’t be able to come back from. That it was possibly an all or nothing thing. And I did it anyway because I decided, that if self-publishing was my path, then it was enough. That if I was to self-publish, I would do it my way, and make it work for me, and that was all I needed. The Reality I don’t think I’ve killed my career, though. In fact, I think self-publishing has only made me grow as an author, just like every other one of my experiences in this industry. And I wouldn’t change my decision even if given the chance to go back. Because the fulfillment that self-publishing has given me at a time in my life where I really needed it, will always be invaluable to me. I don’t expect a publisher to want my previously published manuscripts, but that’s not because of my mediocre numbers or because “everyone has read it already”. Let’s stop pretending that publishers don’t realize that a totally unknown author’s self-publishing numbers doesn’t exactly reflects their market value, and that they wouldn’t pick up something in an instant, regardless of it’s previous history, if they thought they could make a buck off of it. Would a novel like THE HATE U GIVE suddenly become not an absolute masterpiece if you found out that Angie Thomas self published an early draft? (just an example, not actual facts, of course.) No, I don’t expect a publisher to want my previous published manuscripts, because I have no intention of query them again. Because I made the professional decision to self-publish them. I wholeheartedly agree with @JAWeberEdits thread of tweets about self-publishing being a conscious career choice. That’s what this whole blog post is about. My conscious decision to go with self-publishing, even when I believe that it might be something I couldn’t take back.

That being said, through this experience I’ve learned that a lot of what I thought about self-publishing was simply not true. I don’t believe that if you’re one of those authors who decided to ‘test the market’ with your manuscript, that you will be blacklisted and totally written off. The climate for self-publishing is changing. Just in the last five years there has been such a difference in the reception to independent authors. The gap between tradpub and selfpub is closing rapidly. And I understand that comments like this about how we should take our career choice seriously are made with only the intention of giving valuable advice (every decision when it comes to your career should be made with care and attention, after all) but it also is undermined with scary implications that if you are one of those people who made a bad decision, who made a mistake, you’ve now ruined your career, your dreams, your aspirations, for good. it's simply not true. No matter if you started writing in your teens, or don’t have a manuscript ready until your thirties. No matter if you vanity published, or self published, or posted your work online, or used to write fanfiction. No matter if you’ve queried for years, or never queried at all. It is never too late to follow your dreams. What now?
I already said that I’m not very good at wrapping up my thoughts, so let’s end this very long rambling session with what I’m doing right now, and why I’m even talking about this whole ‘self-pub to trad-pub’ topic.

The reason I wanna talk about this is I find myself at this crossroads again with my new novel, EXTRACURRICULARS. It’s a novel that’s very special to me. It’s the idea I came up with after reading Shattering Glass, and has been with me for a very long time, and it’s the first novel under my belt that I could imagine spending another 10 years of my life working on. I think it’s an important story, and I have some other people who think so too. And as much as I absolutely adore self publishing and how it makes me feel, how satisfying it is, I also have to admit to myself that I would probably never have the reach that I feel like EXTRACURRICULARS deserves through doing this all on my own.

So, I want to query EXTRACURRICULARS. I think it’s nearly ready. I’ve entered it into the #AMM, and I’ll find out at the end of the month if someone there also thinks it’s something special. If not, that’s OK. I’m still going to work on it until it’s the best I can make it, and began the query process. I’m going to be picky, because I have the privilege of knowing that if I don’t find the right match, I can publish the book myself, and be totally content with that decision. But in the meantime, I’m going to do everything I can to find that person that cares about EXTRACURRICULARS as much as I do, and is willing to help me get it out there to as many eyes as we can.

I have a lot of worries. Doubts. Insecurities. Is it good enough? Is my query strong? Am I just crazy? Should I just give up? Honestly, I’m starting to believe that being an author, worrying just comes with the territory. But one thing I am not concerned about? My self-published books affecting EXTRACURRICULARS success. I know that if it’s good enough, when it’s good enough, the book will speak for itself.

I really hope to be able to share EXTRACURRICULARS with you all, and with many others, sooner rather than later <3