I always intended to self-publish my books.
I know there’s a pretty common belief that most indie authors secretly want to be traditionally published, and only do it themselves if there’s no other option (i.e. they can’t get a publishing deal), but, in my case —and actually in the case of a lot of the indies I know — I didn’t even try to get a book deal. It genuinely happened by ‘accident’ … which was helpful, actually, because it’s really made my newsletter title make a lot more sense, hasn’t it?
But anyway.
There are lots of reasons why I chose to self-publish my first book (The Accidental Impostor) rather than trying to find a publisher for it, and, I mean, yeah, I guess one of them is that I genuinely thought I wouldn’t have a snowball’s hope in hell of that ever happening. Getting a book deal seemed almost as impossible to me as capturing a unicorn, say, or getting my child to go to sleep before midnight. It also seemed like a long, tortuous kind of process whereby you had to first of all get an agent —which you could do only by querying dozens of agents, and waiting patiently for them all to reject you in turn— and even if, by some miracle, you were to succeed in this and persuade someone to represent you, you then had to start the whole process again, only this time with the agent sending out the queries to publishers, so they, too, could have their chance to crush your tiny dreams by rejecting you.
And, I mean, that’s a lot of rejection, isn’t it? Way more than I, for instance, would be able to deal with. I know a lot of authors use their rejections almost as a badge of honor; we’ve all read the stories about famous books being rejected over and over again, but then triumphing in spite of it all, but, the fact was, I didn’t WANT to have to triumph “in spite of it all”. I just wanted to triumph. Ideally as quickly as possible, because, by the time I was ready to publish Impostor, my blog, which had been my main form of income for over a decade at that point, was on a steady downward slide, and I desperately needed something to replace it.
we’ve all read the stories about famous books being rejected over and over again, but then triumphing in spite of it all, but, the fact was, I didn’t WANT to have to triumph “in spite of it all”
It’s very important to note here that if you’re desperately in need of income, writing fiction is NOT a quick way to get it. In retrospect, I should’ve done what Jo March did, and just chopped off my hair instead; I would’ve probably got paid more for it. But, alas for me, writing is literally the only thing I know how to do (And, also, I doubt my hair is worth as much as Jo’s was…), and I’d been reading a lot of stuff about indie publishing, and how people were making thousands per month from it, and my head was turned by it all.
I remember joining a Facebook group about self-publishing where people were literally claiming to be making tens of thousands per month (with screenshots to prove it), and, I, too, would very much like to make that kind of money, so, why not, I thought, like Bilbo looking at the One Ring? From what I’d read, all I’d have to do would be write numerous books per year, market them round the clock, go viral on TikTok, and then keep on doing that for the rest of my life. Simple enough, right?
It probably says quite a lot about me that all of this genuinely sounded preferable to me than the complicated, rejection-heavy process of trying to get an agent (which could only be done by writing query letters in a very specific format, apparently, and then sending them by the light of the full moon, accompanied by a single phoenix feather, or they just wouldn’t read them), then potentially waiting months, if not years for publishers to reject me, too.
For one thing, I am completely incapable of dealing with even the kindest form of rejection. As a teenager I once went to a ‘meet and greet’ with actor Scott Michaelson — Brad from Neighbours — at which I refused to go over to ‘meet and greet’ him, because I was worried he’d think I was stupid for wanting a photo with him, even though that’s why he was there. Be serious, does that sound like someone who’d be able to deal with multiple rejections for something as personal as writing? Exactly. Even one would’ve made me close down my computer forever and proceed directly to the Victorian workhouse, and where would we be then, I ask you? Other than at the workhouse, I mean?
Anyway. I’m not proud to admit it, but I have literally spent my entire life being told I need to ‘grow a thicker skin’, and I still haven’t figured out how the hell I’m supposed to actually do that, so the chances of me being able to do it in the face of multiple rejections seemed vanishingly small, really.
I have literally spent my entire life being told I need to ‘grow a thicker skin’, and I still haven’t figured out how the hell I’m supposed to actually do that
Quite apart from that, though, the fact was that I needed to make money from my books NOW — not to possibly make money from them sometime in the distant future after I’d jumped through all of the various hoops trad publishing seemed to require. I’m not naive enough to have thought self-publishing was going to be some kind of ‘get rich quick’ scheme (I am pretty naive, tbh, but not THAT much…), but I guess I had developed this idea by then that self-publishing was for people who wanted to build a business out of publishing, and trad was for people who just wanted to be able to say they’d written a book, which someone in the industry had confirmed was good enough to be published.
It’s very important to note here that neither of these impressions are completely correct, obviously. I knew, of course, that the most popular trad authors make bank from it (probably way more than most indies), and that there’s a huge percentage of indie authors who make nothing at all. But I also knew that most authors — no matter how they’re published — have ‘real’ jobs to support their writing; that six-figure deals are not the norm, and that, even if you DO get one, they’re split into several parts, and paid over such a long period of time that it’s not much different from a regular wage.
I knew, too, that I’d been writing online for 15 years at that point, so I was not exactly new to online marketing or social media… and while I didn’t intend to share my pen name with my existing audience (at least, not at first), the fact that I even HAD an existing audience made me (stupidly) confident that I’d be able to build another one, this time around romance books.
With all of that to persuade me, self-publishing seemed like my best chance, basically. So, with the help of my husband, I published The Accidental Impostor in August 2022 … and nothing happened. Which wasn’t exactly surprising, really: I’d chosen not to share the book with anyone in my ‘real’ life, or with the followers of my blog/social media, so all I really had to work with was a ‘faceless’ Instagram account (I don’t think I was even on TikTok at that point), which generated about 5 views per post, and absolutely no sales.
So we tried advertising on Facebook, and a few sales trickled in; not enough to make much money, but enough to generate some reviews, which I diligently shared on my new Instagram page. About a month after the book came out, though, we went on holiday for a week, and, in the general chaos of trying to do everything at once, while in a strange place, and with a small child constantly demanding my attention, I posted one of the reviews to my main profile by mistake.
My secret was out.
And that was it. My secret was out. The post was up for a couple of hours before I realised, and, in that time, the book had sold enough copies that when I logged into my Amazon dashboard that night I almost fainted with surprise.
“Imagine if it sold like this every day?” I said to Terry as we sat on the balcony that night. And, the thing is, that didn’t actually seem impossible back then. The amount we’d sold that day seemed amazing to me, but it was much less than the authors in the Facebook groups I’d joined were making. Now that everyone knew about the book, though, I figured I might as well make the most of it. The genie could not be put back into the bottle, after all, and although I knew that most of my existing audience probably wouldn’t be interested in romance books (most of them having followed me for the fashion and beauty articles I used to write), my hope was that enough of them would be interested to get me some more reviews I could use to market the book — which would be much easier now that I was able to talk about it publicly.
And, there’s no denying, all of that helped. Impostor never sold a huge amount, but I knew the more books I released, the more I could make, so I wrote the next book in the series, then the one after that, and then I wrote two more, still in the same series.
This, it turned out was a mistake.
I’d chosen to write a series because I’d read that this was where the money was; that if you could get readers hooked on the first book, they’d go on to read them all. Which is fine in theory, but what I was forgetting was that this only really works if the first book takes off… which Impostor didn’t. So I found myself in a position whereby I was marketing each successive book to a rapidly dwindling audience (i.e the only people likely to read book 2 are the ones who’ve read book one, and the only ones who’ll read book 3 are the ones who’ve read books one AND two, and so on…), and I basically lost a good couple of years to that series, before the penny dropped and I realised that if I wanted to attract new readers, rather than just continue catering to the existing ones, my time would be better spent on writing a book that didn’t require people to have read three other ones before it would make sense to them.
So I switched to writing stand-alones. Cool Girl Summer came out in May 2024, and, around that time, Terry decided to start advertising the other books as standalones or duets rather than as a series (It’s kind of complicated to explain, but some of those books can be read alone — although they make more sense if you’ve read the rest — while others can really only be read in a certain order. Like I said, it was a mistake…)
We’ll probably never know what happened, but somehow those ads worked. Literally overnight, the books started selling, and, before long, we were making enough money from them that if it had continued like that, it would have been genuinely life-changing for us. We still weren’t making nearly as much as some of the authors in the Facebook groups I’d been following, but, for the first time since starting this journey, it really seemed like it could be a possibility, if we could just stay on the path we were on.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.
At some point in 2024, Facebook changed something in the way their advertising system works, and sales plummeted. Again, this happened almost overnight. Facebook giveth, but Facebook also taketh away is the lesson here. The sales didn’t stop completely, because by then I’d started to build a readership and was getting some organic sales, but it was nothing like it had been, and, no matter what we did to try to build it back up again, nothing worked.
We tried for months. Terry created advert after advert, tweaked settings, and even took courses designed to help him better understand Facebook advertising. I wrote another book, which completely flopped, because the title and cover were all wrong1. So I started work on yet another one, having had the idea for it while still drafting the previous book, but by then the writing was on the wall; something was going to have to change.
I’d written 7 books in three years at that point
Most of all, though, I was just done. I’d written 7 books in three years at that point, and had been trying my best to market them all on TikTok and Instagram, both of which took up a lot of time, without yielding much in the way of results. We’d changed covers and titles, re-written blurbs, and spent money we didn’t really have on advertising. By doing this, we’d managed to sell a respectable amount of books, and I had built a small, but loyal, readership, but I felt like I was on a treadmill that I couldn’t ever get off. As soon as I started working on a new book, Terry (who does a lot of work on the initial plots with me) would start telling me we needed to come up with ideas for the next one, and I knew that as soon as I started that one, it would be the same again, as the emphasis with indie publishing tends to be on rapid release in order to try to maintain momentum and stay ‘relevant’.
I’m a relatively fast writer (or I was until I started writing the book I’m working on now, anyway… ) and I tend to write very clean first drafts, which don’t require a huge amount of editing, so I was able to keep up with this schedule… but it was exhausting. And, every time I released another book, I was painfully aware of how much better it could have been if I’d had the time to take it through multiple drafts; if I’d had the benefit of an actual editor (which we’d never had the budget for), plus things like professional cover design (we paid an illustrator to draw the characters, but did everything else ourselves, and my early covers were entirely self-made), and marketing that didn’t rely on my ability to make myself seem likable on social media.
More than anything, though, it was impossible not to notice that although I was working constantly and releasing books as fast as I possibly could, we still weren’t making even close to the amount of sales we’d been getting back in the heady days of summer 2024, when I’d briefly started fantasizing about buying a beach house somewhere warm with all of the fabulous money I’d soon be making; and by the time we got to February of last year, it honestly felt like we were out of options, and there was nothing left to try.
There was one thing, though.
Which is why, when I got that email from Clem, my now-editor, asking if I was free for a chat, I once again thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I try something else? I’d given indie publishing a pretty good go, after all… and it hadn’t really worked. By the time I received the offer of a two book deal from Black & White, I was on the point of giving up altogether… and although I knew the offer wasn’t going to change my life financially, it felt a bit like I’d been thrown a lifeline which I couldn’t ignore.
It’s also, however, something of a last chance for me.
Although I haven’t ruled out the possibility of returning to indie publishing if the trad option doesn’t work out for me (All of my existing books are still available on Amazon, and we are continuing to market them, so, who knows, maybe one day one of them will take again, off like they did back in 2024…), the reality is that writing isn’t a hobby for me. It’s how I’ve earned a living ever since I finished university, and it’s literally the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Right now, writing books is a full-time job for me, and I desperately want it to stay that way. I don’t want this to be something I squeeze into the edges of my life, or juggle with another job; which I know wouldn’t work for me, anyway.
writing books is a full-time job for me, and I desperately want it to stay that way. I don’t want this to be something I squeeze into the edges of my life, or juggle with another job; which I know wouldn’t work for me, anyway.
If you’ve read this post you’ll know that traditional employment really doesn’t agree with me; I did actually make multiple attempts at writing novels back in the days when I had a ‘real’ job, and it never, ever worked. I have the utmost respect for authors who manage to write on their lunch-break, or type one-handed on their phone while doing something else, but that will never be me, unfortunately. I know from experience that working for other people (even freelance) on something I’m not passionate about basically sucks the soul right out of my body and leaves me with nothing left over for myself.
So I need this to work, basically.
And I’m under no illusions. I know that, although I’ve self-published 8 books at this point, this next release is more or less a debut as far as the publishing world is concerned. I know that most debut authors don’t make a ton of money (And again, I don’t actually need to make a ton… just enough to keep my head above water and allow me to keep doing this), and, just in case I was in any doubt about that, almost as soon as I signed my deal last year, the Substack algorithm kindly started exclusively showing me newsletters about how awful traditional publishing is, how impossible it is for authors to make a living now, and how totally and utterly ridiculous it is for me to hope that I might somehow be one of the ones who does.
But I have to hope that, or I’ll go mad, basically.
So, even though I’ve spent the last seven months reading nothing but negativity about this new route I’m taking, to the point where I’m currently more anxious than I’ve ever been in my life about it, I guess I’m doing it anyway.
Er, please buy my book.
