When a Success is Also a Failure: Part Two

So I had written my book and was ready to get rich and famous.  Other people had done it and there was no reason to believe I couldn’t, too.  (Keep your eyes peeled for a future blog post titled “My Delusional Sense of Self-Confidence”.)

I remember sitting at the bar down the street from my house with Silas fantasizing about what we would do with my royalties.  Obviously, I would quit my job and become a full-time writer.  I mean, I’d already written one book and would be done with Fever before long, just as soon as I could rewrite that crappy ending.

After extensive deliberation, I had decided that my career as an author would take place in my newly purchased home on Peaks Island, every writer’s dream.  The home would have a turret at the top that faced the ocean, which would bring me endless inspiration as well as the peace I needed to fully hone my craft.

Sidebar alert: Could you actually imagine quitting your job to pursue your dream? I mean, who amongst us has not fantasized about sending the following text:  Bob, it’s been great, see you never.

But before I could close on the mansion on Peaks, I was going to have to get De Novo published.  And if I thought writing a book was hard, I had no idea what publishing a book actually entailed.

A little lesson in publishing, if I may.  If you’ve ever dreamed of writing your own tour de force someday, pay close attention to the next few paragraphs.

In order to publish a book the traditional way, one must retain a literary agent.  The first step in finding a literary agent is to identify the literary agents that are interested in your genre of writing (in my case it was literary or coming of age fiction).  You can’t go selling a literary fiction novel to an agent that only deals with science fiction. 

Then, you must go to said literary agent’s website and determine if they are accepting new submissions.  If not, well, that sucks.  If so, get ready to do your homework.  Each agent’s homepage details exactly what you will need to submit along with your manuscript.  This generally entails a one page synopsis of your book (it better be catchy), a one page synopsis of yourself and your literary achievements (perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that to date my most esteemed piece of writing was my eighth grade term paper “Acid Wash Jeans: Why I’m in it for the Long Haul”), and somewhere between ten and fifty pages of your (practically perfect) finished novel.

And once you have complied all of this information (this will take weeks of your life and that’s only if you forgo sleep), you submit all of it to the lucky literary agents who get first dibs on your amazing, one of a kind, life-changing book!

And then you wait.

And then you wait a little longer.

And then you wait even longer.

And then you start swearing and throwing things.

And then you slowly start to realize that you have been rejected by NINETY different literary agents, most of who don’t even have the common decency to send a rejection letter.

And it hurts as much as you think it would.

Now don’t feel too bad for me (trust me, I felt bad enough for myself).  Here’s where things get interesting.  Around this time, I met a woman named Lisa who carries the title of professional proofreader.  Yes, such a job exists.  You have to be really good at grammar, so there are exactly four professionals proofreaders in the United States and they are all retired English teachers. 

Lisa was very reassuring.  “Don’t be silly,” she said with an air of authority.  “You don’t need a publisher!  Publishers are a thing of the past.  They take all your money and could care less about you as an author.  You should self-publish De Novo on Amazon!  It’s easy as 1-2-3!”

Now anyone that knows me knows that I can barely turn on my iPhone, so nothing about this process was going be easy as 1-2-3.  I mean, I’m pretty sure my dog is more technologically savvy than I am.  (Silas just confirmed that my dog is actually more technologically savvy than I am.)

So I won’t bore you with the details, but the next part of this story involves Silas and me fighting to keep our marriage alive as we embarked on the soul-crushing process of formatting the book on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.  The fact that we are still together indicates that my husband either truly loves me or is clinically insane.

But finally, the wait was over!  On November 14th of 2021, De Novo went live on Amazon.  I ordered dozens of copies and watched with utter disbelief as my friends and family did the same.  I was a rising star (there were only 436,000 books more popular than mine on Amazon)!  To celebrate, my sister treated me to a fancy lunch in Portsmouth and I signed an entire stack of books.  The waitress looked very impressed.

It was really happening!  I was on cloud nine!  I honestly figured I’d be hearing from Reese or Oprah any day now.  After all, Oprah was a peripheral character in the book and portrayed in a very positive light!  Turning me into an internationally recognized superstar was the least she could do for me.

Stay tuned for the third and final installation of When a Success is Also a Failure!