For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^
Time for some self-promotion! 😀
“Nowhere to Hide” is the first book that I completed fully, revised, edited, and published. In those early days I even designed my own cover for it, although I later hired a professional cover artist to create a more attractive one. It’s the story of a girl named Nancy and the people she encounters as the world falls apart during a zombie outbreak. But the zombies aren’t the only monsters in this world…dum dum duuuuuuuuuuum. 🙂
This zombie apocalypse story began life after I read Stephen King’s “Cell”, which I loved. After reading it – and having recently watched several zombie-related movies as well – I thought to myself, “I could do this”, and since National Novel Writing Month was just around the corner, I planned to write my first ever zombie story. It was tons of fun, but also posed it’s challenges as well. I struggled with deciding how to handle gore (too much, too little, too graphic), what kind of endgame I wanted the story to progress toward, and for the first time I really had to pay attention to things like the timeline so that I wouldn’t lose track of basic logic (for instance, a broken bone couldn’t heal in a 2-day time-span). By the time I had a completed first draft I also had a brain filled to the brim with doubts. As many authors before me have done, I tossed the story aside, confident that it was complete and utter drivel.
Luckily, I did convince myself to go back to it, and with the help of my beta-reader I was able to fix up the manuscript and convince myself that it was, in fact, actually a good story . It went through several rounds of edits and revisions, but eventually I actually managed to sit back, look at it, and think, “This is good! People will like this!” And so it was off to CreateSpace.com I went.
Some people have asked me why I didn’t attempt to traditionally publish, and believe me, I did think about it. However, in the end I decided that I was better off going the indie route. By the time my manuscript was ready interest in zombies had begun to wane, and querying traditional publishers can be a very long and arduous journey. I didn’t want to risk the time it would require, because by the time a publisher was willing to take a chance on me, it would be entirely possible that zombies had gone completely out of the limelight and no one would be interested in the book.
Was that choice for the best? I don’t know. Selling books as an indie author is extremely difficult, so maybe I would have been better off going traditional after all. Then again, if I’d attempted the traditional route I might still be querying, with no acceptance letter in sight.
In the end, I’m glad that I did things the way that I did because what’s most important to me is that the book is out there, ready and available for people to read. Of course, it would also be nice if people were actually buying and reading it, so here’s my puppy-dog-eyed plea: check it out! You never know, you might absolutely love it!
Have you checked out “Nowhere to Hide” yet? Let me know in the comments below!
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I think you made the right call with indie publishing. I’ve tried going down the traditional publishing route, and do you know what they told me? They told me to indie publish first. Apparently that’s turning into a prerequisite, because traditional publishers now want to see how well you do on your own before they take a chance on you.
I recently read about this, actually, and I have to admit that it kinda P*$$ED me off, because it is SO INCREDIBLY difficult to market yourself as a self-published author among the THOUSANDS and thousands of other authors doing the exact same thing. So the fact that traditional publishers are now using your success-or-lack-thereof with self-publishing as an indicator of your quality…that really really angers me, tbh.
Yeah, I get that. The way I took it, the decision was basically made for me: go indie. But it is a really unfair way to judge someone’s work. Great writers aren’t necessarily great marketers, and vice versa.
Agreed, and the thing is, even if you ARE half-decent at marketing, with indie you’re competing against so many THOUSANDS of other books, that the only real option is to spend money (that you have no guarantee of making back) to purchase ads in the hopes that they’ll help put you at the forefront of buyers’ minds, and that’s pretty much gambling. And even if you fail, it proves nothing. You could have the best book in the world, but no one knows it because they won’t take a chance on an author who wasn’t “REALLY published”.