FRACTURED is the first book in the TELEPATH series. It’s a YA-crossover urban fantasy/scifi book. I originally started writing it almost 17 years ago for my daughters, back when the YA genre was a lot less populated. It featured a strong teenage girl that they could relate to and be inspired by, and it contained all the themes they loved--people with powers, martial arts, swordfights, a school--and set in our city of Ottawa plus Toronto and in-between. I tried to make it appeal to both children and adults. They loved it.
Unfortunately, I never finished it. Understanding why will probably require a lot of soul searching. Regardless, a few years ago I had a few months off between jobs and I decided to write full-time every day and I finished it. It reminded me that I am never as happy as when I'm writing. When I'm in the zone and the characters seem to be writing an entire scene by themselves. It's an amazing feeling.
I was happy with the result and I started to query literary agents. After a dozen rejections, I approached a professional editor for an editorial assessment and was pleased to get a very enthusiastic appraisal. I was told to keep querying, a dozen at a time, waiting a month or two in-between, and expect a hundred rejections. But... that just didn't sit well with me. Why does it have to work this way? Spending years trying to get representation, who might spend years trying to get you published and then maybe fail to do so? With modern print-on-demand services, couldn't I just do this all myself?
So I did. I had a professional editor and a professional cover designer and I handled the layout myself with Adobe InDesign. The hardest part, though, has been the marketing. With no big publishing house handling everything, it was up to me to do it all myself and, more importantly, do it right, with no mistakes.
I made mistakes.
The biggest being not giving myself many months after getting my proofs back to get lots of reviews. So I launched yesterday with very little fanfare and I'm trying my best to get reviews lined up. I started a two-week Goodreads Giveaway yesterday and was pleased to see over a thousand entries.
I'm not saying that I would never choose to go the traditional publishing route in the future, so that I could just focus on writing instead of everything else, but I'm still convinced that self-publishing should be able to work. If a book is good enough, it should be able to do well just via word-of-mouth. So, if this book sounds like something you'd be interested in (think Harry Potter meets X-Men meets Jason Bourne... and maybe Highlander?), I hope you'll take a chance and read it. And if you like it, I hope you'll rate it, maybe review it, but most importantly tell others about it, and prove that a book doesn't need a big corporate machine behind it to be successful.
It just needs to be good.
(reprinted from a post I made to reddit in /r/books)