A lot of things have changed since I last posted here.
Most importantly, I have decided to self-publish.
For most of my life, I saw self-publishing as something weak and amateur. I figured I would never “stoop” to that level. But after two years of devoting my time to sending out query letters and researching who would be a good “fit” for me, I saw no fruit for all my hard work. As conceited as it may sound, I knew the problem was not my writing. I know that my writing is good, and I have enough confirmations of such. After all, every writer has to be a bit conceited about his or her own work in order to devote so much time and energy to it. So why couldn’t I get anyone to pay attention to me?
Through a lucky sequence of contacts and events, I came across an offer to take a trial class with an author named Cathie Beck about how she successfully used self-publishing to nail an agent and a major publishing deal. This idea was new to me. The self-publishing led her to a major publishing deal? I didn’t think that was how it worked. I thought that if you self-published, you get put on some sort of invisible blacklist with a heading like: “These authors have fallen into the pit of self-publishing, therefore they are worthless.”
I no longer see it that way at all. Perhaps, at one time, the market even was like that. But times are a-changing. And so am I!
I don’t want to give away all the secrets of Cathie Beck’s class. If you are considering self-publishing I highly consider you to contact her and sign up for the four-week lesson. More than anything, it inspired me, and showed me that self-publishing was not necessarily a sign of failure. If used correctly, it can become a tool for progress.
I’ve noticed during my last two years of submitting to agencies and publishers that many of them wanted to know about any audience I’d already gathered for myself. This always stumped me. Audience? What audience? I hadn’t been published! This should have been a sign to me that I could have been sharing more of my work, and that it was okay to start gathering an audience for myself.
Every once and awhile, too, I would come across something in an agency’s clarifications that said: “Does not want self-published works.” And I would think to myself, “Well, duh!” But now that I look back at it all in a different light, I think that out of the hundreds of agencies I’ve looked at, I only saw three agencies who did not want self-published works.
The stigma on self-publishing is lifting.
In any case, there’s a bit on how I came to my decision to self-publish. Now, I want to tell you a little about how wonderful it is. It feels fantastic. I am openly sharing my work with people, I am talking professionally to editors and illustrators, and I actually feel more professional about my writing than I ever have before. I have started to release short stories online, long before I release the whole book, in order to start gathering that “audience” I’ve always wanted, and that the agents want, too!
I used to think that writing good work would be enough to get me published, eventually. Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case. An author needs to understand the business. In the past, I refused to look too deeply into the business-side of things: it was simply too confusing, and time-consuming! But it truly is a necessity, and I know now that agents probably weren’t interested in picking me up because they saw that I hadn’t done of the heavy-lifting necessary to get a good book read. I see now that even authors who are successful are still required to blog, keep up websites, etc. etc., all for the sake of marketing. Agents will only pick up someone they know can and will do those things.
I will continue to talk about my ongoing journey here every once and awhile, but to see it in action, visit my new blog: http://talesofmercia.wordpress.com, or my website, www.jaydenwoods.com. I’m kicking it up a notch!
Hope this helps,
Jayden
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