When I was 14 or 15, I wrote Sunshine. I broke my knee that year and had nothing to do. I’d written shorter things before, but I figured the six month recovery home from school on the couch, was a good time to start something longer.But once I was better and I had to go back to school, I set Sunshine aside and didn’t touch it again until I was in my first year of college.
When I was at OCC (my first college), I told my creative writing professor that I had written a book before and wanted to maybe work on it for class. After reading some of it, she encouraged me to try and get it published. I spent a year researching how to publish traditionally, editing, and revising my book. Then finally, I started sending query letters to agents.
I did that for about five years.
Most of the agents I queried never wrote back and the ones who did sent me rejection form letters. There were two, however, that personalized their rejections: One agent told me in so-many-words that the themes in Sunshine were “too mature” for Young Adult audiences, yet “Not Mature Enough” for the Adult genre. The other agent told me flat out that the “market” wasn’t looking for vampire novels anymore, but I could query them again if I either took the vampires out, or wrote them something different.
It was around this time that I took a break from querying. I transferred to Stockton (my second college) in 2010, and in my second semester, I met H.D. Gordon in Intro to Creative Writing. We had a lot in common: we both wrote books about vampires and we had both been through the querying process. She told me about Self Publishing on Amazon, how she was doing it, and how people were reading her book. She thought I could do it too.
Once I knew about this option, I started considering it. I made a deal with myself to try to query one last time. I’d send letters to fifty agents, and if none of them wanted to read more of Sunshine, I would Self Publish.
But with every letter I sent out, I remembered how it felt, back when I was in high school, and people were sharing my work with each other. I thought about how much easier it would be if my work was on the internet, how many of my friends and family could read it. I think I only sent out about ten more letters before I began researching Self Publishing.
I finally published Sunshine on Amazon on January 28th, 2013, and almost instantly, my friends bought it for their kindles and computers. That was what I was expecting, and if nothing else happened, I was happy. Slowly, I learned about how important book bloggers and reviews were, so I started promoting myself and asking others for help.
And in the first few weeks Sunshine was out, I had sold 200 copies. About two months later, Sunshine reached Amazon’s top 100 Best Selling Ebooks. It stayed there for a month straight. On June 28th, 2013, I published the second book in The Sunshine Series, Sun Poisoned. And I’ve sold around 4,000 copies to date.
I don’t regret trying to traditionally publish my book, and I think in the future, I’ll eventually try again with a different one. I learned a lot of things I would not have learned otherwise, the most important thing being that “failing” to get a book traditionally published didn’t mean failure, and that there was more than one path to take, depending on what story I wanted to tell and how I wanted the story to reach people.
I think I would have eventually figured out that Self Publishing was the right path to take for Sunshine, but I’m glad I got that little push. Now, my story isn’t just being passed around in between classes, it’s being read by people all over the world. The most important thing was just sharing my story, so if one or one thousand people read it, I’m happy.
In honour of the final book Sun Damage‘s release Nikki is offering a giveaway. Click the link and grab as many entries as you can before the competition closes and good luck!
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