Confessions of a Rogue Writer

CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE WRITER

Today's Quote
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit."
- Richard Bach

First of all, let me tell you, I am not a devoted blogger. Please accept my apologies in advance. But my online friends will tell you... I'm not the best correspondent. So it only stands to reason that I would have a hard time sitting down and writing about nothing to my legions of fans (ha!).

I call myself a rogue writer because instead of going the traditional route of publishing, I self-published my first novel, The Price Of Eden. Now... there are people in this world that have no respect at all for self-published authors. They think that because we didn't allow some faceless editor at a fancy publishing house dictate every detail of our books that we are not worthy of being called, "authors."

I don't know about other people who have done self-publishing, but in my case, I feel I earned every letter of that title. As someone who spent years going back and forth with more publishing houses than you can count on both hands (plus a few toes), let me tell you, I just plain got tired of folks trying to re-write what I considered a perfectly good story. Did you know that some of the most famous writers received countless rejections before they ever became published authors? What that tells me is this. It doesn't matter if you are truly talented or if you have something that the rest of the world might be dying to hear. If what you’ve written doesn't fit certain criteria or happen to land in the hands of someone who really, really, likes it, then your chance of getting published depends more on your persistence than it does anything else.
I consider it sort of like winning the lottery or your chance of getting struck by lightning... oh wait... that doesn't work because I live in Florida, the lightning capital of the world. Well, okay then... it's like MY chances of winning the lottery.

Most publishing houses have general guidelines for each genre. If your book doesn't fit within those guidelines, your manuscript either winds up on the "rejected" pile, or (if you're lucky) you receive a nice little note telling you that if you change this, that, or that over there, you have a chance an editor might take another look. Been there. Done that. Didn't help.

The reason I finally decided to self-publish is not that I felt my work was too inferior to pass the litmus test of a publishing house. I did it because I was in control from start to finish. No one told me, "you can't use that cover, you can only have this many pages, you can't use that font or font size," and most of all I wasn't repeatedly told, "There's not a market for a book about this particular subject." So what?

Now... I realize that I'll probably never be on anyone's bestseller list, that well-known critics will probably never rave over (or trash) my book, that I won't sell a million of them, or make a lot of money. And that's all right. None of those things is the reason I wanted to publish my book. I had a story to tell and wanted to share it with people who were interested, whether that number happened to be 10 people or 100. It just doesn't matter.

And guess what? I'm about to do it again. Soon. :) Stay tuned!


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