Thank You

So, you write a novel over a period of about ten years.  No, you’re not an author with a big advance from a well-known publishing house.  In fact, you’re a pretty regular person – a busy working mom – and you have no business writing a novel.  But for some inexplicable reason, it’s a calling you’ve felt in your bones forever and you’re unable to ignore it for one more minute.

After trying to write on your own for a while, you do a crazy thing and join a writing group.  The people in the writing group are unlike any people you’ve ever known.  They’re far more interesting and worldly than you, yet you share the same obsession – the need to write a book.  So you stay, and as others come and go, you attend weekly, arranging and rearranging your schedule around the group… for four years.

Your gifted and kind writing teacher shares her wisdom with you in a way that encourages you to keep writing.  This is a very difficult thing to do given the fragile egos of beginning writers.  She is gentle when she points out, early on, that your book has no dialogue and you appear to be afraid to try to write dialogue.  You admit your fear and push through it, with her help, making tentative and terrible attempts to sketch out conversations, which sound nothing like actual conversations. Thank you, Lisa.

You write mundane scenes and you also script intense, uncomfortable moments that come from ugly, shameful places.  You find that the deeper you dig to write from a place of “emotional truth” as your teacher demands, the more your classmates lean forward and nod as you read – sometimes they even cry.  Thank you, Jo-e.

You discover that writing is cathartic and addictive.  That all the stories you’ve listened to and pain you’ve absorbed because you love and feel so deeply now have an outlet.  Your writing teacher takes you all to the beach for a day of deep, soul-searching writing exercises.  On that day you realize that you’ll never be able to give this up, that you might even be willing to give everything else up just to keep getting your fix of it.  Thank you again, Lisa.

So now, four years later, you feel your book is done.  You’re even audacious enough to quit your writing group, despite the advice of your teacher to stay a little longer.  You feel you’ve learned all there is to know about dialogue and character arcs and how not to tie up your ending with a big, fat, happy bow.  Sorry, Lisa.  You were right.

You start to query literary agents.  You hear about other writers who sent queries to 20 or more agents before one was willing to take them on, writers who then went on to publish bestsellers (Stephanie Meyer).  You know full well that your book is no Twilight, yet the seed of hope propels you to keep trying.  But then you pass 20 queries and no agents are interested.  You pass 30 and 40.  Nothing.

You decide to invest money you don’t have in writing conferences where you get to do speed dating with agents. You work to maintain a modicum of dignity as you move quickly from one little white cloth covered table with fake flowers to the next, trying to sum up and sell the book you’ve poured your blood and sweat into in a 20 second speech.  You have to try because your book is your baby now.  Still nothing.  A few tiny nibbles, but no bite.  So you give up.

You give up.  You move on.  You focus on your family and your work.  You’re relieved that the obsession of the book has passed.  It sits there, on your computer, for another four years or so.  You give up, completely.  You don’t even care if the file is lost or destroyed.  You tried.  You did your best.  It was a learning experience.  It wasn’t meant to be.  The psychic who got under your skin, telling you all those years ago that you would someday be a published author, was wrong.

Then an angel comes along.  An angel in the form of a beautiful person who has always been there, always supported you, always believed in you.  She has read your book.  She feels it has value.  She explains to you that there are alternatives to traditional publishing methods.  She offers to mentor you through the process.  The spark is ignited again.  You start to hope again.  Thank you, Corie.

With a mix of dread and excitement, you open up the book file and start to look at it again.  You’re horrified by how unfinished it actually is.  You can’t believe you ever thought it was a completed manuscript.  You see it with brand new eyes, older and wiser eyes.  You can barely relate to your protagonist anymore because you’re in such a different stage of life now.  But you still see some potential there, some clay to be molded.  So you go back to work.  You rewrite and revise.  You share it with your angel and a few others who are willing to take a look and give you honest feedback.  You add new characters, remove others, change storylines, eliminate chapters, add chapters, find typos, find more typos, find grammatical errors, find more grammatical errors.  You bookmark Grammar Girl on your computer and get to know her opinions well.  You realize so much time has passed that you have to replace all references to an “answering machine” with “voicemail.”  You want to give up, again and again and again.  But your angel and a mix of old and new friends nudge you along.  So you keep at it.  A handful of people know, yet mostly it’s a very secretive, solitary pursuit, fraught with fear and self doubt.

Then your angel connects you with someone who is willing to publish your book.  He’s young and super smart and a legitimate publisher with ISBN numbers ready to go.  You love that his company is green and that all authors must donate 10% of profits to social justice causes.  And he has a brilliant young woman working with him now who will be helping as well.  It’ll be what’s known as indie publishing, so there will be a small team of people doing the work, and you will have to pay those people of course, because you’re not willing to work for free, are you?  The more you can do yourself, the more money you can save.  You don’t have any extra money, so this is good.  You scrape up what you can and make it clear you need to keep it all to a minimum.  Thankfully your mom helps with money, a lot of money, and with unending emotional support, as always.  Thank you, Mom.

The brilliant young woman introduces you to another young superstar who used to be a brand manager for a major magazine and offers to help you with publicity.  She allows you to pay far below her going rate because she believes in your book, even before reading it.  Your conversations with her are exhilarating.  You tell her you’d be fine with selling just a couple hundred books if people enjoy it, but without promising anything, her cautious encouragement and seemingly genuine love for your book after reading it allow your dream to grow a little bigger.

You pay all your team members a pitiful wage for the talent they generously pour into your little project, but you hope that someday if the book could just make a little money, you’ll be able to repay them properly.  They help you with all the publishing tasks, marketing, understanding how to use social media, and provide way too much moral support for twenty-somethings to be expected to provide for a forty-something, but you soak it all up because you need it desperately.  They are so young and so savvy, all with Master’s degrees and impressive experience, yet they respond to your questions, changes, requests, and emotional breakdowns quickly and cheerfully, without exception. Thank you, Jake, Liz, and Sabrina.

As you begin to learn about what it takes to create a print on demand book and various eBook formats, your head hurts constantly from trying to decipher the jargon.  You want to give up all the time now.  Even when the book seems free of mistakes and a few more people have read it and liked it, the next phase seems impossible.  Then your hero manifests in the form of your father.  He has done this once before, for a client of his.  He knows how to layout and format the printed book as well as the eBooks.  But the book he created was very different, and they used another source, so he will have to put in hundreds of hours learning new processes and working out kinks.  He will also need to recreate all versions of the book over and over and over, a time consuming, tedious process.  He will have to do this because every time you read a proof of the book, you find another mistake or inconsistency that must be corrected.  But he does all this, for free, and without ever complaining, because he’s your dad, and your hero.  Thank you, Dad.

Then, somehow, suddenly it’s 1/3/13 , the day selected by your spouse to be your book release day.  The day he announced would be an auspicious day to publish the book, as if he subscribed to ancient superstitions, which he doesn’t, but still it seemed to you a divine declaration in the moment.  He has loved and encouraged you through the whole process, every step of the way, and it’s perfectly fitting that he be the one to proclaim the day.  At the time it seemed too far away, way too long to wait, but turned out to be exactly the right amount of time to allow you to finally feel the book was ready.  And now the day is here.  You come to realize that if your husband hadn’t given you the correct date, the results could have been disastrous.  They still may be… but at least he gave you the gift of the exact amount of time you would need and thankfully you listened to him, despite your impatient, impetuous nature, because you know he’s always right.  Thank you, my love.

Now you’re told you need to reach out to reviewers online to ask them to review your book.  You find a random reviewer on Goodreads who also blogs about books she likes and seems to be interested in your genre.  You cold email her asking if she’ll review your book, not really hoping for much of a response.  She emails you back immediately with warmth and excitement.  You send her the Kindle version right away and also send up a prayer.  She emails you back roughly six hours later, having finished the entire book.  She writes something about her reaction to your book that you’ll never forget, not as long as you live: “Wow.  Just wow.”

Her praise and offers of support lift you high into the clouds.  She’s not a friend. (Correction two months later: She is most definitely a friend now!!!) She has no obligation to you.  Yet, she likes your book, she really seems to get it, and she wants to help you promote it, with no expectation of anything in return.  She gives your book a glowing review. She blogs about it, telling her followers that the story and characters are well written and that she looks forward to reading more from the author.  This blows your mind and almost makes you think someday you could call yourself an author without feeling like a total impostor.  She retweets your tweets, gives you the names of other bloggers and tells you to tell them she referred you.  She’s bold in giving you her opinion about every aspect of the book, good or bad, which is why you know you can trust her.  She tells you that you should change the book cover to something more steamy.  You’re considering it because she has a very big following online and she knows what she’s talking about.  And she does all this for you because… actually you have no idea why she does all this for you.  Maybe there are people who just genuinely want to help a struggling artist? So she is another one of your angels.  Every time you email her (pretty much daily), she emails you right back with more helpful suggestions and praise for the book.  Thank you, Terri.

You want to write more about all the people you have to thank, but your publicist has kindly yet repeatedly reminded you that blog posts are supposed to be short and sweet.  Oh well, you can only teach an old dog new tricks to an extent, I suppose.  Though your heart is full of fear over the varied reactions to the book that will continue to come your way, it is also swollen with gratitude for those who are mentioned here and so many others who you will have to thank individually.

Oh, and I know you already know this, but just in case there was any confusion, I was actually talking about me, not you.  Thanks for reading.  Would love to know your thoughts.

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