First and foremost, I want to say that you've been a big inspiration for me, Amanda! Your decision to go self-published, selling your work at prices the average reader can easily afford, and then making it BIG is part of what keeps me sane.
Speaking of which, why did you go the self-published route, as opposed to traditional? It's been a couple years since I read your personal story, and so I can't recall if you submitted to any publishing houses prior to going S-P.
Thank you for your kind words. Before self-publishing, I did initially submit to agents in hopes of going the traditional route. Most publishing houses do not look at unagented manuscripts.
When I finished my first novel, I was seventeen, so it was 2002, and the Kindle was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. Prior to the internet explosion of ebooks, the only way to self-publish was incredibly costly and rarely led to sales, since it involved printing of stacks of books and essentially going door-to-door with them because book shops wouldn't usually stock them.
I continued writing and submitting different books to various agents. By 2010, I'd written around 10 or 15 books (I don't remember anymore, and half of them are very bad and unpublishable), and I'd also racked up hundreds upon hundreds of rejections.
That's when I heard of self-publishing being a viable option online, and I figured that I had nothing to lose. If I self-published my books and they didn't sell, it didn't matter because they already weren't selling.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
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青少年小說I'm doing a Q&A ! How it will work is from April 27th until May 3rd, you can ask me anything - about Ice Kissed, if I prefer Ridley to Konstantin (or Konstantin to Ridley), writing in general, my favorite books, the publishing industry, Muppets, my...
