This year I self-published my first novel, The Devil On God's Doorstep, via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, after twenty-one years of working on it. It was a huge decision - one that I made last September/October, and then spent months agonising over. I learned to be ruthless with the editing process: I discovered that the manuscript contained a lot of teenage angst and childhood trauma that just didn't serve the story. Eventually, I would cut the manuscript in half, publishing it a full month after the date I had set for myself. The final novel ended up a third of the page count of the earliest typed draft, but it was the story that I wanted to tell, and finally the version that I felt confident seeing in print.
I'm glad that I finally did it - I'm glad that it is now available from Amazon in multiple territories worldwide (in hardback, paperback and kindle ebook!) but the journey to get to publication was harrowing, and the process of marketing it ever since has been challenging. I've been making sense of it all on my blog, with more posts to come, but here's a post with a bit of background on the genesis of the novel. I've also spent time transferring my blog content from Medium to Wordpress, and will shortly be abandoning Medium, allowing people to read my posts without the paywall getting in the way. If anyone else is in a similar position to me, vis-a-vis self-publishing their first book, maybe there's something useful in my blog posts past, present, and yet to come...
:)
https://daniellyddon.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/twenty-one-years-in-the-making-how-the-devil-came-to-gods-doorstep/
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Amanda Michel Thank you. I am digitizing, because, you know. At least if there is a fire, flood, or whatever, I can still have it in the cloud. Also, clearing space.
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That's exactly what happened to me with my memoir, Cinema. I started putting it together and thought it was a nice short memoir of my cinema-going and movie experiences coming in at around 10,000-15,0...
Expand commentThat's exactly what happened to me with my memoir, Cinema. I started putting it together and thought it was a nice short memoir of my cinema-going and movie experiences coming in at around 10,000-15,000 words. It's now more than TREBLE that! I found a mountain of stuff I'd forgotten about. And then I just kept finding more and more and adding more and more to it.
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David E. Gates It has to be done, doesn't it? :) Otherwise, knowing it's there makes you not sleep at night.
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Absolutely. The Roots of Evil came about from having "found" an old story I'd part-written but never finished. I revised it, expanded it, added to it... and now it has a sequel and will be part of a trilogy!
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I believe that all methods that activate creativity and take us out of comfort, are welcome. Thank you for sharing your experiences.