Publishing Paths: Roads go ever ever on (I hope).

I’ve missed a few months, but today, I realized it was  Insecure Writer’s Support Group Blog Hop Day before the day was over. The first Wednesday of every month, the IWSG posts an optional question, encouraging members to read and comment on each other’s blogs.

September’s Question is:

What publishing path are you considering/did you take, and why?

When I got serious about my writing, the publishing path I always imagined for myself was a traditional one. Get an agent. Get a deal with a big publishing house. Eventually, make money off of my writing.

I’d been writing on and off for along time, starting projects and never finishing them, until one November, my anxiety got so bad that I could hardly breath at night when I went to bed, let alone sleep, so I got up and I wrote. I wrote about the things that scared me, that kept me up at night and triggered my anxiety. After a 200,000+ word draft and more words of backstory and world building, I swore I was never going to let anyone read that book, opened a file for an untitled book  I started back in 2007, and decided I was going to finish it.

Not only did I finish it, but over the next year or two, I revised it about ten times. Meanwhile, I wrote and published flash fiction and short stories. By the time I was consistently getting paid for my short fiction and had truely lost count of just how many revisions a book that had morphed from “The Erin book” to “Inattention,” I decided I was ready to start querying agents.

I researched queries and agents, I bought a copy of  Writer’s Market’s 2016 guide to Literary Agents, wrote a query, had my critique parter and critique group read and sent it off. By my second batch of queries, I changed the title to Power Surge. If you read any of my posts or tweets about my publishing journey, then you probably know I made all the newbie mistakes. My query was too long. It had too much backstory. It made the characters sound passive.

My attempts to personalize queries were horrible mostly because I didn’t have a person read every single personalization, and I have a problem with proof reading. I can print something out, read it out loud, read it backwards or out order, I can apply every known proof reading strategy and miss some ridiculous typo, especially if I haven’t taken my ADHD meds. When I queried Power Surge to agents, I wasn’t on them at all and hadn’t yet discovered how much they could help me edit.

I still miss typos, especially on last minute blog posts like this one. I got some requests and over 100 rejections. I was probably up around 120 when I’d had enough of querying agents. Some people would’ve shelved the book at this point, but Power Surge was my baby. In the time I had been querying it, I’d finished a 3rd novel and turned my 200,000 monstrosity of a first book into a decent draft of a 87,000 word supernatural thriller.

More importantly, I believed in Power Surge and needed to find a home for it. I some ways, it was the book I always needed and never had. It embodied elements of my favorite writers, but had the mental illness rep that was missing from my favorite books, and had a main character I poured a little too much of myself into.

I revised one more time, trimming the book and brining Erin’s non-binary gender identity out of the shadows just a little, and queried small publishers. Within a few months, I had two offers and signed with NineStar Press. They’re traditional in the sense that they don’t charge writers anything, have a talented in-house cover artist, and do very thorough editing. However, there is no advance, and while they do some online marketing, its up to me to book events and get into brick and mortar stores.

It’s not the traditional “Big 5” debut I dreamed about, but its a start. I have a fantastic cover and an editor that really gets the book.

Editing  Power Surge reminded me just how much I love the characters and world it is in, so now I’m back to drafting the sequel even if it does mean putting a revision of my YA space opera on the back burner for a little bit. The Evanstars are calling me, and I feel like if  I don’t head that call, my writing will suffer all around.

In the long run, I still want an agent and a chance to get a deal with a big publishing house. Some people tell me this will be harder now that I’ve published under my legal name with a small publisher. Others have told me this isn’t a problem. Either way, I’m going to keep writing, revising and editing. I’m going to keep putting my work out there.

For now, i’m content with as long as I don’t have to pay to have my book published, get great covers and professional edits, but I will never stop trying to break into the big leagues of publishing.

For now, you can help me out by adding  Power Surge to your “to-read” list on Goodreads. Or Pre-order it from NineStar Press.