People looked down upon self-published authors and were quite vocal about everything they were doing wrong: bad covers, no editing, horrible plots with holes you could drive a truck through. I thought it meant that my book wasn’t good enough. My husband and my critique partner urged me to consider self-publishing. This realization, however, didn’t make the rejections any less heartbreaking. In hindsight, I was probably naïve in thinking that anyone would take a chance on a debut novel that didn’t fit neatly into a single genre and had, quite frankly, a somewhat risky storyline. I sent out the first batch of queries and rejections started rolling in an hour later. I drafted my query letter and polished it to a high sheen. When I completed On the Island a year ago, all I wanted was to obtain agent representation. Read more stories from successful authors in self-publishing on how they did it, including Theresa Ragan and Karen McQuestion. No marketing campaign in the world can compete with the power of a large number of positive, word-of-mouth recommendations. One of the questions I’m asked the most is, “How did you sell 365,000 copies of your self-published debut novel On the Island?” There’s no short answer, but if I had to sum up my success I’d say that I owe it to the readers who embraced my story and shared their recommendations with friends, family members and, sometimes, total strangers.
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