Past the Gatekeepers

After talking to Professor Burton about an old project of mine, he asked that I post about it. I'll be brief because it's a pretty long story and encompasses the work of about four years. I have actually published a book called Bubblegum Psychology. 

I became somewhat monomaniacally obsessed in my grade school years with publishing before leaving teenagehood. That by itself is a long story. Let's just say that I did a lot of writing in my free time. I was becoming frustrated with a long time book idea and decided that I wanted to quickly pump out a story, completely unconnected to anything I'd done before. I gave myself a lot of deadlines and made myself finish it without dragging things out. The first draft took about a year (I was still in high school). Editing and figuring out business stuff took about another year. The book is not phenomenal, but it's good. It feels good to have a real, physical copy of something I wrote to put on the shelf. 

The current process for publishing a book is arduous and frustrating for a first time writer with no connections. I had already learned about querying and rejection from previous projects. I got a lot better with writing concise letters, but it still wasn't enough. No takers for this project. I realized that I was running out of time to meet my goal of publishing as a teen and decided that nobody was going to stop me from this goal, even if it meant publishing it myself. 

I didn't want to go to a vanity press. I ended up reading a great book by Aaron Shepherd called "Aiming at Amazon" which introduced the idea that you could make a living by skipping a publishing company altogether and getting yourself a contract with a print-on-demand company. 

Here are some of the things I did:

• Artwork - including the painting you see on the cover as well as pencil illustrations inside the book. Worked with Gimp (a photoshop-like program) and Adobe Illustrator as well
• Formatting - You really don't think about things like how to set margins and what size font your story should be until you're staring at your MS word document and realizing your novel can't be published as an 8.5X11 without looking like a dingus. Also it's better if it's not in Times New Roman. This thing has to look polished, like a company put it together
• Editing - My family's not really into reading. My best friend helped edit it. No other takers. Every time the word "lose" appears in the first edition, it's misspelled. 
• License - In order to be a publisher, I needed to file for a license to do business in the state of Ohio. I think it was $25. You also need ISBNs, which make the most sense to buy in a batch of 10. 
• Printer - I signed a contract with a company that had a print-on-demand service, meaning I wouldn't be left with 1,000 unsold copies of my book in my garage. 
• Publicity - Facebook page, traditional posters (which my best friend posted around the Ohio State University and they kept getting stolen - that's good, right?), and a home website were some of the ways I tried to get word out about my groovy new book. Took copies of it and posters to libraries and asked if they wanted them. 
• Reviews - Submitted a copy to Flamingnet, a popular YA review site. Got a great review :) Also tried to contact others who would review the book (mostly bloggers).  Also tried to get some motion with Goodreads.

And yet you have probably never heard of Bubblegum Psychology before. That's probably because 

1. I didn't really interact with writing communities. I built my mill away from the stream.
2. I don't know what I'm doing

I've already moved on to more projects because I realized that BP was becoming like my last failed project: the more I worked on it, the worse it got. So I've already written a new book. I'm hoping to use tools from this class to better integrate with writing communities and bring more people to a phenomenal home site, which I will have to create. I just need more content. Lots and lots of content. Then people will believe that I'm a whole company, and not just some doofus in her basement pretending she makes books. 

This was art from one of the posters

Additional content included 2 short stories involving a side character

I can still build on what I've done. I will build a great big
tower of "Hey look, I wrote something."