My adventures in Self-Publishing: First blog post

Since this is my first blog post I guess it would be fitting to tell you how I started.

The Writing

It’s been a long journey definitely not an easy one, there were times that I wanted to give up and throw in the towel and just chalk this up to another attempt at doing something and realizing I wasn’t very good at it but as it turns out I wasn’t too bad. Sometimes when I get stuck or don’t want to do this I sit back and think about the day when I wrote those very first pages and how it made me feel and that always seems to get me back on track because I realize once I finish, this will feel even better than it did when I wrote the first pages.

It’s funny because I watched many interviews from, these different authors no matter how many I watched they would all always say almost the same thing “the idea just came to me.” And I can tell you before I started writing I thought it was a bunch of publicized crap their publishers told them to say. I kept thinking to myself how can an idea just pop into your head and you instantly turn that into a story? It seemed absolutely preposterous to me!

I thought stories needed structure and extensive planning, not just the form of a single idea! So when I watched those interviews I rolled my eyes. That was until I experienced it myself. And now I can tell you without a doubt sometimes the idea does just pop in your head. Without any warning or any preparation, it’s not just a bunch of publicized crap.

I remember the day it happened to me. I was just sitting in my room not really doing anything just relaxing and letting my mind wander. No TV no music, no noise whatsoever and as my mind began to wonder I saw two people in the airport, and I started to think what would they be doing in this airport? As I started to think all these ideas kept flowing into my head. And that became my first chapter of my book. The best way I could describe it would be the main idea of the airport being a small drop of water trickling from a faucet and the rest of the ideas that followed were like when you turn the water on all the way and it just pours.

Now keep in mind that I had never experienced anything like this before so it kinda scared the crap out of me.  Not only was this idea coming to me but it actually made sense! Because what you have to realize about me is I never thought the possibility of writing a story of my own would ever come to be. I just thought it was a fantasy you had like when you’re little and you claim that you want to be a cowboy or an astronaut or gold-medal gymnast. Those are things we always say because for little kids the idea seems so outlandish and unachievable but fun to say.

So writing my own book was the equivalent of being an astronaut. I read stories I didn’t write but them when this idea came to me it suddenly didn’t seem so crazy. Because from this idea I could see this whole plot of a book. that for me that was a bit scary and exciting at the same time as I started writing I just couldn’t stop! It was like my fingers have a mind of their own before this I had never written more than five pages in my life, and those pages typically tend to be high school essays on subjects that I hated, so they seem to drag on forever before I reached the five pages.

But with this, everything came so easy and when I stop typing I realized that I had written 10 pages! now that I’ve been writing for a while it doesn’t seem like much but that first time I was shocked because it was 10 pages of my own idea, not some essay question I had to follow. After that, I kind of came to a standstill because I had no idea where to go next. So like I tend to do most of my writing I put it aside,  a quiet little project no one would ever see. Something I didn’t think I would ever do again.

As it started to sit there on my desktop I didn’t think about it much, in fact,  every time I turned on my laptop it was there the big blue W reminding me of my little attempt of what I thought would never become anything. The more I saw it sitting there the angrier I became, so one day I decided I was gonna move it into the recycle bin. But before I had a chance to do that my mom asked to borrow my laptop, you see me and my mom tend to read a lot of the same books,  so once in a while, she would use my laptop to read those books. little did I know she would stumble upon  the document and begin to read it. She found my little experiment! Yes, at the time I thought my world had ended because no one was supposed to see my horrible failure.

So while I was curled up in a ball of nervousness in the corner she read and I waited. (those were the longest 10 minutes of my life.) But to my surprise she didn’t tell me it was awful or horrible she told me that it was good in fact, it was so good that she didn’t believe I wrote it at first. But after a little convincing she believed me and wanted to know what happened to the rest of the story! To me that was just a shocking as writing those first 10 pages because when I read it back to myself I didn’t see anything great or extraordinary or even good, yet all it took was my mom’s little bit of encouragement and her belief in my story and the next thing I knew it turned into a full-length novel!

Query letters and Self-Publishing

After it was finished I got a little excited by the idea of getting it published. Of course, having no experience in this area I didn’t know where to start so I searched around a couple of blogs like Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling. Once I knew exactly what I needed I began to write my query letter and I will tell you the first few drafts of it are absolutely horrible! But after I got critiqued by a couple of writing groups I was ready to go. I looked up a bunch of different agents, must’ve been 120 or so, and sent out my letters with my sample chapters. For about the first 10 response letters, I was so excited because I didn’t know what they would hold after I learned they were rejections I was less and less optimistic with each letter that came in.

I cried my eyes out,  I didn’t know what to do. I thought to myself okay you gave it a shot and they obviously didn’t like what you wrote, so just put this aside as something you accomplished and move on. So that’s what I did for about four months, it wasn’t until I was looking through the Kindle store on Amazon that I came across an author named Amanda Hocking. I read her first two books and decided I liked them well enough to visit her website to see if she had written anything else. It was there I saw her story, just like me she received about 100 rejection letters and decided to self-publish her stories.

She ended up becoming and Amazon and New York Times best seller making 1 million dollars in just under one year! So I thought my stories are just as good right? so from then on, I made it my mission to learn everything I possibly could about self-publishing and get my book ready.  Finally three weeks ago I saw see the light at the end of the tunnel, I found an editor who would edit my whole entire manuscript for about $250 and a formatter who only charges $35. I created my website and my very own Facebook page along with Twitter. It was then I decided I’m finally ready to release what I’ve been working on for six long years, so in the next couple weeks as I  prepare to launch my book, I can tell you I’ve never been more excited about anything!

So that’s how it all started! Here’s to hoping everything stays on the right track and goes the way it supposed to, fingers crossed! My next blog post to you all should be on the release date, so to all of you reading this I thank you for taking the time to read it. See you soon!

Chandra