 Hello! If you are new here, my name is Jackie, I'm a soon-to-be-published author. If you are not new here, welcome back. It's great to see you again. So as I mentioned, I am a soon-to-be-published author. My first novel, Powerless, is going to be coming out on June 13th this year. I'm hoping there will be pre-order links ready by the time this video comes out. If there are, they will be in the description. If not, stay tuned for the next video. They'll be added then. So I wanted to do a video to explain why I decided to self-publish, because I was someone who never thought I would self-publish fiction. And there are a number of reasons why other authors might want to get traditionally published. It might be they're not sure how to produce a book, they don't have the budget to do it themselves. For me, the biggest pieces were validation and marketing support. So let's look at each of those. The biggest reason I wanted to get traditionally published was because I felt like if my book wasn't accepted by an agent or a publisher, then it wasn't good enough to get published. That was that. And if it wasn't good enough to get published, that was fine. It just meant I would need to write another book. And the truth is that there are other reasons beyond quality why a book is rejected. It could be that the agent or publisher doesn't know how to market it. It could be that there are similar books on an agent's or editor's list and they don't have space for another one that's like yours. It could be that they just have too many books at the moment so they're not taking queries or they don't have room for another client. And none of these reasons have anything to do with the quality of the book. So having this blanket belief that not getting a traditional publishing deal means my book's not good enough isn't actually true. Yet I spent most of the last three years believing that. So to give you some context I wrote the first draft of Powerless at the end of 2019. I revised it over the next year or so and I think it was April 2021 when I started sending out queries. Over the next year and a half I sent over 80 queries and this was to both agents and independent publishers. Of those 80 queries almost all of them either rejected me or just didn't respond. I did get one request from an agent who then rejected the book once she saw the full thing which was not a good day and I had one independent publisher who was interested in working together but I decided it didn't feel like a fit. Basically I'd been getting all of this feedback from the market that the book wasn't good enough and it shouldn't be published. Until August 2022 my thought process was this isn't the book for now and I love this book. I've done a lot of work on this book. I've had beta readers. I've had critiques. I've had a lot of people see it and give feedback. I still like it when I go back to it but clearly it's not good enough or not marketable or people don't have space for a book like this. So I'll just put it to the side and my plan was to put Powerless to the side and work on something else that was more marketable and then once I got the future agent or publisher I would say okay and how about this for book two or book three or book four because one of the things I noticed with like superhero books that were traditionally published is that unless they're tied to a property like DC or Marvel they don't tend to be an author's debut. Usually they've got a few books out already and then they do the superhero one. So I thought okay maybe like I've got this written now but it can be a later book and that was my plan until August when I actually won an award for this book. In fact do I have the medal? Yeah it's that one. So I um as part of my querying journey I entered Powerless in a bunch of competitions for unpublished novels thinking that it might help get the attention of an agent or publisher and one of these competitions was from a conference called Killer Nashville which is mostly for like crime and mystery type of books but they also allow books with elements of suspense so mine like I'm like well it has elements of suspense so I might as well submit it and actually won in the YA category so I had planned to put this book to the side and then I got this validation that I was looking for which was oh maybe maybe this is good enough and the reason it isn't getting picked up isn't because of the quality it's because of those other reasons I mentioned earlier it's because of the marketability or something else and what's funny is that after I won this competition I started getting other forms of validation not a contract obviously but I had that independent publisher who was interested in the book. It is currently shortlisted for another competition for unpublished books. I ended up working freelance with an editor from a company that only hires people with traditional publishing backgrounds and he thought it was in great shape and that it was something I should try publishing myself and getting that feedback from someone with the traditional publishing background was really encouraging for me and then the final piece of validation was I actually applied to join a writing retreat which is coming up in March and you needed to submit a 3000 word sample for that and what was interesting is the faculty who were reviewing these like samples for the program everyone on the faculty is someone I queried or someone from an agency I queried who rejected the book but I did the sample from powerless and I said and at this point I was like okay I think I'm going to self publish but I'm not quite sure so if I get this one thing if I get into this program then that's a sign and I got into the program so the first thing I was looking for from traditional publishing which was the validation is this good enough to publish I managed to get elsewhere I got through the competitions and through the editor and um through like getting into this program so it's like okay first checkbox done the next reason I was interested in working with a traditional publisher was for the marketing support now when it comes to producing a book I'm very comfortable with that I actually used to have my own self publishing company for entrepreneurs so that means I know how to publish a book like I have cover designers that I've worked with before I have editors I've worked with before I know how to set up a book as an e-book and print on demand so I didn't have a learning curve that I was worried about it was purely the marketing because the books I published in the past they weren't written to be sold if that makes sense so the way it worked was if you're an entrepreneur and you're writing a book as a business tool you're really planning to use that because of business card in that you will give the book away to free to someone with the hope that they become a $10,000 client so instead of like selling a book and hoping to make $20-25 a book you're giving the book away because it's part of a sales strategy so that meant my authors were never really worried about book sales so we never had to market the book as a book the book was like a brochure for their business it was a very different business model by contrast I'm now hoping to publish a book as part of the author business model which is about selling books the book is the product and I wasn't sure how to get people to buy my book so I knew how to produce a book I just wasn't sure how to market a book and I really thought like I know there's a limit to what traditional publishers do in terms of marketing especially for new unknown authors but I thought at least having someone to like ask is there something I should be doing would be helpful now then one of the independent publishers I queried in fact this was the one who was interested in working with me they asked me to submit a marketing plan as part of my query so what I ended up doing was I made a list of like over 300 different influences I wanted to reach out to I learned about Goodreads giveaways and amazon ads and looked at how you'd get a net galley account and all these different things I'd heard of as part of the book marketing process but because I was planning to traditionally publish I never really looked into it myself because I knew that the publisher would need to set up a lot of these accounts and what happened somewhat finally is by the time I finished the marketing plan I went oh this doesn't feel that complicated like maybe I could do this after all admittedly I have no idea if it's going to work I could just spend a whole lot of money and nothing happens but I felt like before I did that marketing plan I would have just been putting the book out there and maybe doing some Facebook ads and hoping it worked whereas now I'm like okay I've got this list of activities I'm going to do and maybe it'll work or maybe it won't but at least I feel like I have a starting point so that was the other reason I wanted to get traditionally published and then when I felt like I'd figured it out it's like oh well maybe I don't need to get traditionally published after all so I decided to self publish the book and there's still a part of me that goes oh maybe I should wait maybe I should just keep powerless in my back pocket and write something else and get that traditionally published but the more I think about it the less sense it makes to wait because ultimately I want to be a working author and I know that a big part of being a working author is having more books out because when someone finds one of your books they're more likely to go back to your backlist and that's where you start to make an income that only works if you have a backlist so if I publish powerless this year then I'm starting to build that backlist which is both terrifying and very exciting so I don't know if that was interesting but that is why I someone who had hoped that this book would be traditionally published and wanted to be traditionally published for three years decided to self publish and it's coming out on June 13th which is very exciting very scary if the pre-order is ready links are below if not they'll be ready next video so I will see you then