Why I Chose Self-Publishing

When I finished my first manuscript, what did I actually want? Not an agent. Not a deal. I just wanted the book out there, in someone's hands, and honestly I didn't care if that someone was one reader or a thousand.

Looking back, why did that turn out to be the right call, and not just an impatient one? Because at the time, I had no clue how to write a proper book. If I'd spent a year querying agents first, I most likely would have been rejected over and over, long before I ever got close to a deal.

Why trad publishing wasn't realistic starting out

Here's the part that's easy to miss: querying isn't really a test of whether your writing is good. It's a test of whether you already know the industry, and starting out, I didn't. I had no comp titles, no track record, and no idea how the whole system worked. For a young author with no guidance, that's an overwhelming place to start from, not because the writing is weak, but because you don't even know where the starting line is.

This is easy to hear as "your book isn't good enough yet." It isn't that. It means you haven't learned the game yet, and that's a completely different problem, one you don't have to solve before you're allowed to publish anything at all.