I was something of a goody-two-shoes as a kid, a teachers’ pet. Not a kid who got in trouble at school. By the time I hit high school I’d learned to capitalize on my “good girl” reputation to get away with things, knowing that I wouldn’t even be questioned for a hall pass when I encountered a teacher in the corridors during classes… But it speaks volumes about my frame of reference that I considered a passless wander as a “naughtiness”—that, in fact, it didn’t occur to me to take it further (say, a wander OFF-campus during school-hours)…

No, I was not a kid to get in trouble with teachers. Which is probably why my fourth-grade teacher’s scolding felt so traumatic.

Every winter in our gradeschool, every kid submitted a story to a judging panel—and every spring, a boy and a girl from each class were chosen to attend the Young Writers’ Conference at the nearby college town. We carefully copied our finished stories onto the inch-high lines of gradeschool notebook-paper (the kind with a dotted line down the middle of each row like the center stripe of a highway), and we meticulously illustrated the poster-board covers to our “books” (the original “self-publishing” format)… and by fourth grade it was pretty much a given (in my own mind, certainly–though the facts so far had borne it out) that I’d be the girl representing my class.

The week after we turned in our booklets, our fourth-grade teacher called me up to her desk at the front of the room while everyone toiled over spelling worksheets.

“What is THIS?” she hissed at me, holding out my booklet, held open to its final page.

The question confused me. For one thing, “THIS” was clearly labeled with a heading at the top of the page: “Other Books by This Author.” For another thing, I knew (being a Reader!) that “THIS” was a standard feature of any book not written by a one-hit wonder. I’d listed out my (contest-winning) titles of the three previous years, and I was really not understanding her query. But it was hard to miss her meaning a moment later, when she ripped out the page and shoved it into my hands with another hiss: “I didn’t tell you to do this. THIS doesn’t belong here.”

It’s been four decades but I still remember the burn of incipient tears as I strpde back to my desk with that torn-out page in my fist—although even in the moment I doubt I could have told you if those were tears of mortification or indignation or rage that I held back. “Well,” (I comforted myself) “I’m going to be a famous author, and THEN Mrs. Roberts will be sorry!“

At age nine it didn’t occur to me to question my assumption that I would become “a famous author.”

By age nineteen, however, I’d acquired some taste of reality. The professor in whose poetry-writing class I enrolled each semester always required her students to submit some works to poetry periodicals for prospective publication—and it hadn’t taken many semesters for me to amass an extensive collection of rejection letters.

Rejection.

I couldn’t even get this tiny little work published, in magazines that did nothing but publish this type of work. I had surrounded myself with people whose entire focus in life was writing-and-publishing… yet only that professor, among us, had actually experienced the latter. Every semester I would come face-to-face with some seriously high-quality writing from my peers in those workshop-classes… but none of us had broken the barrier.

It’s harder than I’d imagined, actually getting published.

So perhaps you can imagine my all-encompassing excitement, my utter elation, when I finally unfolded a letter that didn’t begin with those insincere “regrets.” It came from a magazine so obscure that even writers have never heard of it, and my poem would share a page with other equally obscure poets… But the poem about Grandpa’s Indian kachina figurines would be published!

I would be published.

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Grandfather's kachinas used to call me 
from behind their glass,
leering through their painted masks,
suspended in their ritual dance.

(The prayed for what? The rain? The hunt?
No, they prayed to me
to free them from the glass,
the naughty creatures.)

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In the years between college and grad school I continued to accumulate rejection letters—but now the occasional acceptance-note spiced the mix.

Somewhere along the way, in the years since my fourth-grade face-off with Mrs. Roberts, I’d come to create a mental distinction between “writer” and “author.” This has nothing to do with official dictionary-definitions, just a foible of my own mind. To consider yourself a writer you don’t need any publications at all—if you’re writing, you’re a writer! But in my own mind, being an author has more to do with publications. I had hit one milestone on the author-path, in getting poems published, and I told myself that the next milestone would be when I could walk into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and buy something there that I’d written.

When I was in grad school, working on my teaching credentials, it happened!

Oh, it wasn’t a book with my name on the cover, and I’m sure it was only carried in local-area Barnes & Noble locations—but I did get to walk into our Boise B&N and purchase the anthology of Idaho poets that included a contribution of mine.

I had such a great moment that year, in one of my classes. Our prof invited a local author to give a brief reading from his own work and then sit in on our “workshop” session, where we’d each read from our own work and accept suggestions and commentary from our classmates. I’d brought a newer poem to workshop, but when our guest-author gave his own reading from that Idaho anthology… Well, I couldn’t pass it up. “May I borrow that?”

I held out my hand for the book he’d brought. And oh-so-casually read my own poem from it.

(My classmates may or may not have been impressed. But my credibility with the prof—who was fangirling all over herself around this author—definitely got a boost.)

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When I was at these early stages of my incremental authorhood, the internet barely existed, let alone tools like KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), the medium of the e-book, or a marketplace like Amazon. Self-publishing was a channel for “losers”—and losers with a substantial bank account, at that, because you’d have to pay for the entire print-run yourself (and pray that they didn’t end up boxed in your basement when you couldn’t sell them).

Fast-forward some decades, and self-publishing has acquired a much higher level of acceptance and legitimacy—nor does it require any investment of funds. Not only can you publish directly to Kindle and the Apple bookstore, your paper books can be printed one at a time, as people order them—so you no longer have to pre-purchase a whole load of them to get them printed.

The major milestone was holding my own book in my hand, with my name on its cover! And then there were some mini-milestones to go with it—like seeing my books posted on Amazon, and listed in GoodReads, and getting book reviews from readers, and seeing the Amazon rankings. (On Kindle my 12-Step “Sponsor’s Instructions” is ranked #43 in a category that contains over 50,000 books.)

And let’s not be disingenuous: making money is a milestone as well. I just bought plane tickets to Kaua’i with royalties earned from that 12-Step guide!

There’s a big milestone still remaining, the one I’m saving for the novel I’ve been writing: publication with a “traditional” publishing house. This isn’t about prestige; it’s about practical considerations. For one thing, I’d like the help of an editor on this one. And for another, I could use the help of their publicity machine.

For my 12-Step guide, I had an easy time with marketing. I paid for some targeted marketing when I released it, setting up ads to show my book to anyone who searched for “Alcoholics Anonymous” (or A.A.’s “Big Book”) on Amazon. I just needed to get the momentum going, and then that one has taken care of itself. I haven’t paid for advertising for a year now, but when you type “Alcoholics Anonymous” into Amazon’s search bar, my book usually shows up on the first or second page of the search-results. This is the one that sells enough copies to stay on the first couple pages of search results—the one that has delivered two-Hawai’i-plane-tickets-worth of royalties.

That one was easy, though, because I had an obvious anchor-phrase for keywords. Someone searching “Alcoholics Anonymous” is definitely my target audience (and… my target audience is practically guaranteed to use those words in their search). The other books are tougher, without that slam-dunk keyword-phrase… So although I’ve seen the one example of an easy-to-jumpstart, practically-sells-itself marketing project, I also have five examples of why a publishing house’s publicity machine is an important resource!

I could self-publish this novel. The publishing part of the equation would give me zero problems… But getting the published work into people’s hands is another question entirely.

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It’s an unsettling prospect, trying to break into that traditional-publishing-house world. Not only do you have the obstacle of getting a publishing house to look at your work—first you have to land the agent who will get you to the publishing house. (Once in a while someone “unrepresented” breaks through… But it’s not a likelihood I care to count on.) From where I’m sitting, it seems every bit as tough to court an agent as a publisher!

This makes me think of applying to colleges… If colleges were much harder to get into, and if you had to hire someone to do the applying FOR you, and if it were just as hard to procure one of those guys as to get into the college itself!

I’ve been sending “Query Letters” to agents for over a year now, which is sort of like inducing someone to marry you using a single email and a photo of your left knee. There are certain items of information they expect… But you don’t want to sound like every other moron out there flogging a book… But you also don’t want to sound so whack that they cringe when they read it… (You’d be surprised how difficult it is to determine where the line falls, between “sounding intriguing” and “sounding alarming.”)

But there’s hope and help on the horizon! When I was reading through some of my posts from 15 years ago (prompted by the traffic those posts have been receiving lately), I came across an incident I’d forgotten entirely. I’d received an email from a publisher in New York, telling me I should reach out to her for advice when I had a book ready to publish.

I noted the date on the blog post, and opened up the email I’d been using in those years, and found the email—and thus, the email address… And crafted a note asking if a fifteen-year-old suggestion were still on offer.

Turns out this is what she does now: she advises authors in crafting their query letters to agents, and works to connect them with agents who might be open to what they’re peddling. Exactly the advisor I need right now! I’ve met with her once already, and now I know some things to rewrite and reframe. (Chief among them: this book is too long to sell! Apparently it needs to be framed as an “epic,” and suggested as a two-or-three volume project.) Left to myself, I could have been querying agents for years and never finding out why no one would take it…

So now it’s time to rewrite my query letter, polish off my whaling manuscript, and take another leap toward the coveted next stage of authorhood. I’m sure I missed my window to “make Mrs. Roberts sorry”—but I’d like to think I have worthier motivations these days.