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Taking a Risk and Expanding the Reach of My Work
A worthwhile risk is always worth taking, in my opinion.
I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old. Over the years, I made a lot of attempts to go the traditional route with publishing.
For a brief time, I had an agent — but he wasn’t the right fit for me (sci-fi fantasy wasn’t entirely his thing).
After my first professional edit — my fantasy novel, Seeker — I queried lots and lots of agents. One in 5 sent a personal rejection — the rest just sent a form letter wishing me the best of luck at finding someone.
This is the way of traditional publishing. Query, get rejected, query again. Many well-known authors were rejected dozens of times before someone took a chance on them. What’s more, for every one of them that had wild success — probably another dozen or so, though they got representation, may have had success or not. It’s a total and complete crap shoot.
But then the tools for self-publishing became increasingly available and user-friendly. With the proliferation of eBooks and Amazon, self-publishing has become a worthwhile option.
But it’s not completely clear, nor cut and dried, either.
