Early in 2018, as my life was consumed by health anxiety and depression, I had the nightmares about the wierllings and the girl trapped on top of the tower. You can find a detailed account of the nightmares in “Reawakened Flames.” The dreams stuck with me, and I began to craft a story about the girl. The idea floated around in my head for a few months, but it was just daydreams at first. As I came up with more to the story, I realized that there might enough to write a book about, maybe even a series of books. This could be the fantasy series I had been dreaming of writing.
Based on a suggestion from a friend, I looked up self-publishing. It seemed really interesting. I spent some time learning about how it worked and what the differences between self-publishing and traditional publishing were. In hindsight, I only did about a month or two of research, and I had only scratched the surface of what all I needed to learn. I decided to publish with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Sometime around July, I began to write.
I had a rough idea for the storyline, but I didn’t know what the whole book would entail. I started writing the first chapter, but I got stuck. In a post about writing, I saw a tip that if you get stuck at the beginning of the book, you can try moving to another part. I had a good idea of how I wanted the scene of Aria trapped in the sorcerer’s keep to go, so I started there. After I wrote that section, the beginning and the end finally clicked.
When I wrote fanfiction, I never worried about how good or bad the writing was. I tried my best, but there wasn’t a lot of pressure for it to be perfect. This time, I dealt with horrible anxiety. This is covered more in the How I Deal with Writing Anxiety post. I had to work hard to overcome my fears. The anxiety did slowly fade away enough for me to enjoy writing again.
I completed the first draft in a about two months and named it Rise. It took a little over a month to edit. I looked up a few writing tips and tried to put them into practice, but I didn’t do enough. Based on the little research that I had done, I thought I could just quickly and cheaply do the editing and cover design myself, and it would all be fine. The only thing I paid for with the first book was an ISBN number.
The book was live for only a few hours. I made a mistake with the imprint name in the details on KDP. When Amazon asks for the imprint or publisher name, they want the name that you are using to publish with, not the company you bought the ISBN number from. You type in your name, the name you are writing under (like a pen name), or a publishing company name that you come up with. I took the book down, but I couldn’t change the imprint name at the time. I did get it fixed later. Thank you KDP support!
So, the first version was a complete bust. No one bought it. The only copy of it that exists is a print proof pdf that I downloaded from KDP. That’s why I consider it as edition 0. I looked over the story, and I edited again. I decided that I was going to name the series Rise. I looked up different names until I came up with the unique book one name of Reawakened Flames. I did a little more preparation and put the book out again.
Now, here’s the thing. I was still very new to self-publishing. The only research I did was reading the KDP manual and looking up a few articles on how to self-publish and improve writing. This was all in about four months, maybe less. That wasn’t nearly enough.
If you are new to self-publishing, take your time with the research. There are YouTube videos (look up authortubers), blog posts, articles, and books that will help. Try to have a finger in every pie that you can find until you feel like you have a somewhat solid foundation to build off of. It took me about a year to teach myself enough to confidently publish the final version of my first book more professionally. It may take you longer or less time, but don’t rush it. You’ll still make mistakes, but as long as you are constantly working to learn and improve, everything will be worth it.
The first two books were spectacular failures. Would I change anything that I did? Probably not. I learned so much from them, but I made a lot of mistakes. For starters, I didn’t get them edited. It really does help to have a professional editor(s) look over your manuscript. I had been really proud of the second iteration, but when I read back through it, the text was full of errors and mistakes that I had missed. I treated writing and editing the books the same way I had treated my fanfictions. I still had a lot to learn about publishing, and my writing needed to drastically improve if I was going to sell books instead of uploading a little story for people to read for free.
I thought I could make book covers myself in the KDP cover creator, but since I’m not a professional designer, they just don’t look that great. As you saw above, I didn’t even get the same cover for both formats of the second iteration. I had picked a layout that I really liked for the paperback, but it wasn’t available for the eBook edition. I also couldn’t figure out how to put the series name on the cover. I completely forgot to put the series name on the title page too.
I also realized that I then didn’t have a file of the cover that I could use in other places. I couldn’t publish the book anywhere else because I needed a cover file to upload. I also had wanted a profile picture and a banner with art from the cover for social media. I couldn’t have that either. I found free stock photos and used Paint to type Rise on one for a profile picture. I posted a link to the USA Amazon book page on Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram sat there unused. That was it. I had no idea where to go from there.
The blurbs are also too long and probably reveal more than they should. I somehow managed to sell a few copies of the second iteration, and there were a good number of downloads when I offered it for free. I apologize to any strangers who read that one though. It wasn’t ready to go out yet. The next few months of my life would go round and round as I tried to figure out what my next move would be…