The Road to Blue Revolution and Why I Chose Indie Publishing
Hello Friends,
As we approach the release of my debut YA fantasy novel, BLUE REVOLUTION (summary and cover reveal is HERE, if you missed it!), I want to talk about the evolution of this novel and why I chose to pursue independent publishing.
BLUE REVOLUTION began with an idea I had around 1998-99. I was a preteen and reading a lot of manga: Magic Knight Rayearth, Oh My Goddess!, Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi... My brother and I also spent a lot of time playing JRPGs, especially the Breath of Fire and Final Fantasy series. In the beginning, the story started as a few rough sketches, with the vague idea that I would one day write a comic, or maybe a videogame.
A few years later, I was a teenager, and my brother dragged me along to see a movie. You might have heard of it: Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. I dragged my feet the entire way, but then something unexpected happened in that movie theatre: I fell absolutely and utterly in love.
I began reading fantasy novels, starting with J.R.R. Tolkien. I read the three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy before the film release of The Two Towers. After discovering my love for fantasy fiction, I devoured Tanya Huff, Mercedes Lackey, and R.A. Salvatore, to name just a few. I also became obsessed with Anne Rice and Edgar Allan Poe around this time-period, but that’s a story for another day.
I began writing BLUE REVOLUTION as a novel. I wrote all through high school, My family got our first computer when I was in Grade 9 or 10, a hand-me-down from one of my uncles. I saved early drafts of BLUE REVOLUTION on 3 1/2" floppy disks.
The first time I ever submitted BLUE REVOLUTION to a publisher was all the way back in 2004! I was 18 years old. I printed off my entire manuscript, put it in a shoebox tied up with string, and sent it off to my favorite publisher of fantasy books (Don't do this, it's not how it's done.)
Obviously, it was rejected: I was a kid and didn’t know what I was doing.
But I knew what I wanted to be doing: writing.
Disappointed, but not deterred, I continued writing. In college, I wrote two sequels to BLUE REVOLUTION. Well, I wrote most of them. I got distracted part-way through the third book.
The seeds of doubt had begun to creep in.
I decided to begin from scratch and re-write my saga. I changed the characters names and their occupations. What if they were a troupe of traveling actors in a more grounded medieval world? To be honest, I’ve lost this version of the story. I have no idea what happened to it.
I began working at my first full-time, permanent job in 2008. I was still trying to write and re-write this story. The main character’s name changed again. This time she was a redheaded princess named Alice, who was betrothed against her wishes to an evil sorcerer. Kind of a cliché, and yeah, this version of the story didn’t really work, either.
I wrote many versions of BLUE over the years, and they were all incredibly different from one another. I wrote a grim-dark version, where the main character’s brother was a serial killer. Then I decided to go lighter in tone, and wrote it out like a script for a comic book. I wrote a version where one of the main characters was a merchant blessed by a goddess of fire. I wrote it more juvenile. I wrote it more adult.
And all through this, my brother, my first reader, kept saying: go back to the original.
Finally, I listened.
I wrote a version that was closest to that first draft. The draft written by an enthusiastic, optimistic high school kid, who just wanted to share their love of fantasy.
BUT WHY INDIE PUBLISHING?
By this time, it was 2015.
I really wanted to get this book published. Traditionally published.
I did research. I read popular YA fantasy titles of the time, to see what was out there. I read every article I could find on how the publishing process works.
To briefly summarize: you need to get a literary agent, and the agent submits the manuscript to potential publishers. So, I read countless interviews with agents. I bought the Writer’s Market books. I obsessed over sample query letters. I combed through every current YA fantasy novel I could find, writing down the names of the agents thanked in the author’s acknowledgments.
In 2016 I attended the Toronto Writers Workshop, wherein the participants met and spoke with literary agents and paid extra to have my query letter professionally critiqued.
After all of this research, I compiled a spreadsheet of every agent in North America who was interested in YA fantasy books at that time. I carefully read each agency’s instructions for submission. I meticulously followed their directions. I dutifully tracked every submission.
I was going to open that document, so that I could tell you how many agents I submitted to, but I can’t find it. Maybe I finally deleted it, for my peace of mind. It must have been about 100.
The thing with submitting to literary agents is that 99% of them don’t write you back. You wait months for a response, and you do wait, because everyone warns you that the process takes time.
Sometimes you get a form rejection. Mostly, you don’t hear anything at all. Out of all the agents I submitted to, I think I received a personal response from one. It was a single sentence, and they didn’t even bother with capitalization or punctuation. All it said was to feel free to submit another novel in the future. I received a form rejection from maybe 3-4. Mostly I received an impenetrable silence.
I’ll admit that this constant rejection, this wall of silence I could never pass, wore me down. Let’s face it: after a couple years of shouting into the abyss, I was about ready to give up.
But there were a few things that kept me going:
I had the occasional poems published here and there (a lot of them are now collected in SKULL MOSS: POEMS.)
In 2017, the Future Fire published one of my short stories: Shadows in the Water, a fabulist piece about a group of friends, who turn out to be reincarnations of people who died on the Titanic. It’s still available to read online.
My friends and my brother kept encouraging me.
And I still really liked the story and wanted to tell it.
A fellow author, who was having similar experience with agents and trad publishing, was busy exploring independent publishing. He did a ton of research on it and kept encouraging me to explore this avenue. Now his book is out: WILLOW’S RUN is a dark, atmospheric thriller and I highly recommend it.
But could I do that?
Isn’t it, like, really hard? Isn’t it a lot of work? I’m not great with technology. What do I know about formatting a manuscript? I can barely use Instagram.
Maybe the constant rejections contributed to this low sense of self-esteem because I was absolutely convinced that I didn’t have what it takes to be an indie author.
Flash forward to 2020 and we hit the pandemic.
I was fortunate, I didn’t lose my job. However, at the beginning of the pandemic there was a brief period when I was in lockdown. I started to think about things. I started to wonder if independent publishing was really the impossible task I had made it in my mind.
I started doing my own research. I started experimenting. I found Youtube tutorials and books that answered my questions. I’ve listed and linked a bunch of these resources HERE, to share with anyone else who might be in the same place.
And now we’re here! BLUE REVOLUTION is coming out! I feel like a weight is being lifted from my shoulders, as this book is finally being released into the universe. And I feel good about the independent publishing process.
There are a lot of benefits to "going rogue" and thinking outside the box of trad publishing. Complete creative freedom and complete control over every aspect of production, from cover art to font size and page layout, are so huge (and unheard of in trad publishing) that I can hardly overstate them. And you can learn how to do anything, if you're willing to put in the work.
I have many ideas for The Blue Sequence going forwards, and other creative projects. The beauty of remaining independent, is that I don't need to worry about convincing someone else (an agent, or a marketing department) that the ideas are worthwhile. I don't have to worry about crushing my ideas into traditional genre boxes or fitting a publisher's particular vision of what they want to sell. And that's good, because I'm going to write some weird stuff.
BLUE REVOLUTION is getting one final read-through this week (shout-out to my brother, helping out again!) and I hope to be able to hit that "publish" button in the next couple of weeks.
Thank you for going on this journey with me.
(I promise book #2 won’t take this long.)
All the best,
Sel
Comments