Publishing isn’t the “End-Game”

I’ve always wanted to be published. I can’t say “I’ve always wanted to be a writer” because I’ve been writing stories and books since I was a child, which by default turns me into a writer. But I wanted to be a published author, because that, to me, seemed like the end-game of any writer: to have your book in a book shop.

My parents were partially supportive (yay, go you, your book is great, I loved it) and partially practical (you’ll never make money being an author, make sure you get a degree and a real job). I railed against them of course. Why couldn’t I do both? So many people already do both. They were right, although don’t tell my mother I said that…

I tried to go down the traditional pathway, because that’s the goal, isn’t it? I thought signing that contract would be everything to me. It would mean those books in the bookstore. It would mean someone would take over and do my marketing for me and all I’d do would be to hand in the final, edited manuscript and watch it transform into something that everyone wanted. I submitted my first completed novel to a publishing house at the age of 17, and watched my dreams of becoming like Christopher Paolini get trampled on as I got my first rejection letter.

As I grew, the avenues to becoming traditionally published felt harder:

You can’t submit to a publisher directly, except on Fridays, and they must be children’s fiction only.
You can only submit through an agent.
Oh, the only agent who deals with fantasy books lives in Australia.
No, they don’t take fantasy anymore.
You can only submit to agents who are taking on new authors.
Here is a list of agents.
Nope, we’re not taking on new authors right now. Unless…
Do you have anything which is social realism? Do you have anything with childhood abuse?
We’re not publishing fantasy right now.

It’s bitter work, reaching out to agents and publishers. The rejections feel personal, even when they are written to be anything but. The letters don’t offer feedback, which makes you believe nobody has actually read your work, and worse, nobody wants to. Query letters feel awful to write. Why do I have to convince you to read my book by getting you to read this letter first? Can’t you just open the book file and start reading?

Curse my parents for forcing me to consider the other person’s point of view! Because I do. I understand about agents getting overwhelmed with submissions, and not having the time to offer criticism or notes, and having to politely reject thousands of hopeful authors every week, otherwise they wouldn’t have time to do their job with the authors they do have in their wheelhouse.

And still I really, really wanted to be published. That was my end-game.

So I went down the independent author road. I looked up Amazon KDP, thought it looked reasonable, and started prepping my favourite manuscript for publication, doing the hard yards of editing myself and designing my own cover. I published, and then had to go through the weird and wonderful intricacies of understanding how to market, how to get books on different platforms, how to push people to leave reviews. There was so much I didn’t, and still don’t, know about this industry.

And in doing this I found out that publishing actually isn’t my end-game. While I have been learning about how to get my name out there, and people to read my work, I’ve readjusted what the end-game is to me. I write because I love it. Because I have stories in my head that I want to share, and if I manage to get them published, that’s amazing! But that isn’t the final destination. Once they’re published, I’m not just going to stop and hang up my pencil. If I die with unpublished works I’m happy with that, too.

I can’t stop this wild and wonderful ride I’ve embarked on. It’s exciting, sharing what you’ve done and learning about new things, and somewhere my little 17-year-old self is happy that even one person other than my family has read a book that I wrote and published, even if I had to do it myself. So let’s keep going and find out what else might happen. As someone wise once said: the time is going to pass anyway.

Caro Geelen
Author of “The Colour of Her Magic” and “A Plague of Dragons”