Anyone who’s taken the time to write an article, short story, or book dreams of the day it gets published and they can see their hard work in print. I was fortunate that my oldest had already gone down the path of writing her own books and she inspired me to finally finish one of tales that had played out in my mind for years. And so, I decided to take the plunge.
It took at least a year and multiple rounds of proofreading and edits (special thanks to my girls) before I had a manuscript ready. My oldest was already working on her first full-length novel, (Check out The Rebuild on Amazon) and my youngest had started dabbling with her own tale. We were suddenly a trio of writers, each exploring our own creativity, and I must admit, it was an awful lot of fun walking down this path together with my girls.
Although my youngest is still exploring her script, my oldest and I finished nearly the same time and each decided we’d give the traditional approach a try. So, we set off preparing proposals and samples and submitted to multiple literary agents seeking to represent our respective genres. One by one the rejections came in. Some agents would just ignore and let the request expire. Others would at least respond with a “thanks but no thanks,” but in the end, reality set in. Why would any reputable agent want to promote a completely unknown author with no presence or following?
My oldest, having self-published her own children’s book and humorous tales of marriage explained the path of self-publishing on Amazon, and down the rabbit hole we went.
While drafting Universal Translator, it was important to me not to use AI for writing the story. There’s just something about bragging rights that doesn’t seem right when using artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean I didn’t run it through spell check or spend a lot of time with a thesaurus, and both my girls will attest to my annoying, “you mind taking another look at chapter X?” That being said, when it came to the cover design, I was at a loss. I knew what I wanted in my head, but I can’t draw for the life of me. It was hubby who helped put together the cover image using his friendly AI assistant, Gemini. And with a little bit of tweaking, the cover design was ready. Who knows, if this whole writing thing pans out, I might reach out to my beautiful and very talented niece to craft the cover for my next book. 😉
I must admit, self-publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was a lot easier than I expected. It took a lot of resizing and adjusting to get the format correct, but once it was, the process was quite easy, and nothing can replace that feeling of holding something you just put your heart and soul into in the palm of your hand.
So, Universal Translator is out there for the world to see, and I’ve actually made a few sales. Of course it won’t do much good if nobody knows about it, so now I get to dive into the whole self-promotion and marketing thing. Fun times! 😊