One year ago, my first book How to Survive a Ghost Story was published. One year ago was also when I vowed to never self-publish again because good lord self-publishing is tough. Although my thoughts on the latter are ever-shifting depending on my writing moods, the former remains: I published a book. It exists in the world now and sometimes people read it. It’s the dream I’ve had since I was six years old realized and it happened because I made it happen.

Now the decision on whether or not to self-publish is often a difficult one to make, mainly because it’s usually an irreversible one. There’s thousands of pros and cons to self-publishing over traditional publishing with the general consensus being that traditional publishing is the better route for any “serious” writer. In fact, despite the increasing popularity, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is still so prevalent that I’ve even taken to avoiding the term when discussing my book with others. I’d rather let the work speak for itself rather than let its publishing history precede it.

I knew all of this when I made my decision to self-publish. I also knew I wanted to traditionally publish one day regardless. I read all of the blog posts and articles comparing self-publishing and traditional publishing, how it would affect my career as a writer, the budgetary and creative downfalls, etc. and I still chose to self-publish my debut novel. Why? Well for five main reasons:

My book falls into a super niche genre that’s hard to market to traditional markets

Really, that’s the nitty gritty gist of my reasoning to self-publish. How to Survive a Ghost Story is a YA paranormal comedy about a group of teens who have to save their small town from evil ghosts. This can be properly marketed two, maybe three, spooky months a year and even then its target audience is rather small. Even if somehow a literary agent decided to take a chance on my little book, it would have to fight against an already highly competitive market with a primary genre that has been snubbed since 2009 and a secondary genre that has never really found its footing in the YA age category.

Combined with its quirky story layout, How to Survive a Ghost Story never really stood a chance in the traditional publishing field and I knew that when I wrote it. It was definitely meant for the indie book scene which allows quirky novels of all genres to thrive and, so far, it has done really well there. Two of my favorite independent bookstores still carry copies of it a year later when most big box bookstores would’ve kicked it out by now (love you Old Firehouse and Tattered Covers <3). As an indie author as well, I have total control over the marketing and the reach it gets which is nice for a niche book with a seasonal audience. It’s not so nice when I realize I’m the only one responsible for my book’s success, but I’d still prefer to be the one in control of my weirdo ghost book during the slow summer months.

Traditional publishing takes ages and I wanted to publish ASAP.

One of the most notorious cons about publishing in the traditional method is the amount of time it generally takes to publish a novel. Speaking in a very general sense, it can take over a year for an unrepresented author to even find an agent to sell their work to a publisher. From there, it can take anywhere from months to years for that work to get published. Sometimes, that work never gets published anyways. It gets shelved and the author has to write a whole other book before proceeding with the publication process. If you’re keeping track at home, that means traditionally publishing a book can take two to five years from start to finish for debut authors with no existing track record. Of course, this is speaking super generally. Some authors might get lucky and have an easier, shorter time with publishing their first book. Others…..not so much.

All of that being said, it only took me roughly nine months from the moment I typed the final period to publish How to Survive a Ghost Story.

I’ll get more to how I managed to make that timeline work in a little bit, but the point is that I was impatient. For personal reasons more than anything, I really just wanted a book of mine to be published and read by people other than me. I already went through the gambit of trying to get traditionally published in college with my first novel and had a miserable time. If I was going to put any sort of exhaustive and emotional effort into publishing a book again, I at least wanted an actual published book out of it that people could read. Hence, self-publishing.

I had the resources and skills to self-publish my own novel.

Fun fact: I have a visual media minor attached to my fancy Journalism bachelor's degree. I also have years of marketing, video creation, graphic design, and social media experience from running a mildly successful YouTube channel and the various odd jobs I’ve held over the years. Combine all of that with a gung-ho confident attitude and I barely have enough skills to scrape by self-publishing my own novel without having to hire out any work or worry about other professionals’ turnaround times.

I acknowledge that I’m very lucky to have the education and experience necessary to earn this skillset. I’m also incredibly lucky to have a great support system of friends and family who were willing to help me with the tasks I couldn’t handle myself. If I didn’t have any of these resources, there’s no doubt in my mind I never would have self-published any of my novels. The budget, time constraints, and the difficulty of the task would’ve been too much. In fact, the only reason why I’m holding off on self-publishing any future novels for now is because I really need someone else to handle the business side of things. Actually anyone handling the business side of things would be better than me. Math and finances are decidedly not within my skillset and unfortunately, as I learned the hard way, those are required skills for self-publishing a novel.

I also had the time.

Remember when I said I managed to publish my book within nine months? Yeah that was pretty much nine months of non-stop work. Everything from the layout of the book to the book cover design to copy edits to marketing plans was done in between a handful of freelancing gigs and shifts at odd jobs. From the moment I woke up to when I went to bed at night would be non-stop work whether on publishing the novel or at my actual other jobs. I took maybe one day “off” in that whole time frame and that was definitely just to catch up on life stuff outside of publishing my silly little ghost book. I literally became a “ToDoist” master from the daily tasks I assigned to myself to make sure I could publish my book before the Halloween season. There was no way I could accomplish that in college. There’s no way I can accomplish that now with my full time day job.

The point is that if I didn’t have that time, I wouldn’t have self-published. There was just no feasible way it could’ve been done. It was exhausting and stressful enough when I was in control of my schedule let alone if I had a full-time job or was attending school full-time on top of it all. I still remember the sheer relief I felt when it was finally done and when I finally had a day where not a single ToDoist task was due. It was unlike anything else and almost makes me want to never self-publish ever again.

Almost.

I wanted the experience.

Above all else, I really just wanted the experience of self-publishing a novel. I wanted to know what the process of writing a novel, editing it, formatting it, second-doubting it, re-editing it, reformatting it, marketing it, and then selling it all by myself felt like. I knew that even if I got super insanely lucky enough to get traditionally published, a little part of me would always wonder for the rest of my life what self-publishing a novel would be like. How to Survive a Ghost Story was the perfect novel for my experiment. As I said earlier, it was odd enough that I could trust to not worry about that nagging “What if I did traditionally publish it though” thought hovering over my experience, but it was easy enough that I could handle publishing it on my own.

Overall, I don’t regret my decision to self-publish How to Survive a Ghost Story. At all. It’s one of the few decisions I’ve made where I can look back and go “.....yeah I don’t regret that at all.” I feel like I learned a lot about the art of writing and publishing books in this process. Will I ever self-publish another book? I’m doubtful, but it’s not a hard no. If I ever wrote another weird novel that doesn’t fit into any of traditional publishing’s markets, then absolutely. There’s one story idea I’ve been mentally playing with that fits that criteria, but again the process of self-publishing does require a lot of work and a lot of time that I don’t currently have. I think the next step of my writing career is to try out another experience by traditionally publishing, but who knows. Every book has its own journey and this just happened to be How to Survive a Ghost Story’s journey.

It also happened to be a very good and lucky one.

The e-book version of How to Survive a Ghost Story will be $0.99 from September 20th, 2019 to October 31st, 2019 in honor of its first birthday and Halloween. Because spooky.