After my announcement that I was going self-published, a few people thought that I’d just taken Black as Knight’s submission process badly, and that I should have just gone and written another book and moved on. What they don’t know is that I did.

Not that the Black as Knight submission process didn’t hurt. It did. After spending 8 years on that book, for it to spend another 8 months on submission, only for it to then fail at the last approval… was very tough! After that happened in March 2021,...