For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write children’s books. By that, I mean chapter books for children, otherwise known as middle grade. I wanted to write stories like the ones that I grew up reading so that kids could be entertained, comforted, and informed about what could be in store for them growing up.
When I graduated from college in December 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, I felt like it was time to get started fulfilling that dream. Between job hunting, I started working on a novel which I was developing from one of the short stories I had workshopped in my fiction writing classes.
In my last one-on-one session with her, my fiction writing professor pointed to this specific story and told me, “This could be the beginning of a novel.” It was a story about a young girl who spends an afternoon helping her elderly neighbor with some yardwork. Afterwards, she and the neighbor talk about how much their street has changed since the neighbor was a girl.
The story was based on a relationship I had with two elderly neighbors growing up. So, it was easy inspiration for me to draw from and create a five to 10-page story for class.
My professor didn’t give me any direction as to where to take it from there. She just said, make that your chapter one and then keep writing. So, I did, and within six months, I had written my first novel. Here is what I would have done differently before self-publishing my first novel.
The content
My short story was a semi-autobiographical tale that really didn’t have any conflict or plot. All it had was dialogue, atmosphere, and a strong relationship between two characters.
To flesh it out into a fully-fledged novel, I asked myself what message I want to convey to middle grade readers, specifically those the age of my main character, 11-year-old Heidi. At 11, I would have liked to have known what junior high school, what we called middle school in our school district, had in store for me. So, I set out to write almost a guide as to what to expect during that transition.
I set my story in 1995. In reality, I didn’t start middle school until 1997. So, having my protagonist two years older than me created a bit of a disconnect. As the oldest of four kids, I didn’t know anything about pop culture. I had no older siblings to teach me what was cool. I had to figure it out for myself by watching MTV, reading Seventeen Magazine, and actually walking the halls and listening to how the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders dressed, talked, and acted.
On top of this, it was now 2007. The culture was a lot different than it was in the 90s. And now, the “late 1900s” as kids call them now are as far away as the 60s were for me as a kid.
So, in hindsight, if I was going to write a “guide for surviving middle school,” I should have consulted with my youngest sister and her friends who actually were in middle school. Or, I should have just moved the story up to 1997 and then used references from that year instead of researching what was cool in 1995 and then had no actual attachment to a lot of those references since I was still playing toys, wearing clothes with Disney characters on them, and could not name any of the top 40 songs of the year.
Cutting the fat
The story also packs in a lot of elements that are hard to keep track of and really flesh out in a reasonable amount of pages. The main conflict in the book, other than my protagonist, Heidi, starting middle school, is the fact that her house catches on fire one night, forcing her family to move into her dad’s friend’s dilapidated rental home while their home is being rebuilt.
I also threw in an adopted brother who is the son of Heidi’s mom’s best friend. Heidi didn’t grow up with many friends. So, she was always the tagalong sister. Once her brother starts playing JV football, though, they don’t see each other as much. The temporary move also separates her from her elderly neighbor, Violet, the elderly neighbor from the original short story who I then have to find ways for her to show up in the story as often as possible since she’s no longer right across the street.
Heidi loses almost all of her possessions in the fire. So, she has to make do with hand me downs and other donated items during a time when kids are the most judgmental towards each other. Luckily, she befriends some girls in the neighborhood at the rental home, but, like all friendships, it has its ups and downs.
Heidi also has a babysitting disaster at her old home early on in the book. I then show her overcoming this obstacle by successfully babysitting for another family in her new neighborhood.
I also throw in the family celebrating Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas along with a birthday party and a school dance. It’s a whirlwind of events meant to mimic the busyness of the school year, but that also makes for a difficult elevator pitch when it comes to querying publishers and agents. It also creates a whiplash-inducing series of events for the reader that’s a bit convoluted and creates a ton of loose ends to tie up.
The biggest loose end in the book is a very weak love interest, an older boy who Heidi develops a crush on. This boy also seems to take an interest in her, but there really is no reason why he would like her. He’s older, popular, and he’s just one more element to pack into an already tightly packed story.
I just wanted to write a nice boy into my book, the kind of boy that I would like Heidi to end up with. Still, it’s not always about what you want, even as the writer who gets to play God in your fictional worlds. The story will dictate what it needs as you write it.
The submissions process
Once I had done a fair amount of self-editing to the book, I felt that it was ready to query. Finding a publisher for your book is already a major undertaking and one that is difficult even for seasoned professionals to land a deal, let alone a first-time author in her early 20s who is competing for shelf space during the Twilight and Hunger Games era. Who is going to care about my book when there are no fantasy, supernatural, or dystopian elements to it?
I took the alternative approach, and in my query letter, I bashed these popular novels, telling publishers how refreshing it will be for kids to read a book that doesn’t have sparkly vampires in it. It was cheap shot and one that I wasn’t qualified to make.
Through the years, I’ve learned that this industry is a business like any other, and I have no right to pan the stories that sell. I’ve also come to appreciate the fact that fiction for girls already gets a bad rap. So, you really shouldn’t bash it, even if a story or series isn’t for you.
Popular books will get your target audience reading. So, they will decide what kind of stories will keep them reading.
Opinions needed from my target audience
It also would have been nice to find out what my target audience had to say about the book before releasing it to the world. That target audience would have been girls ages 10 to 12.
I see so many authors trying to say that their book will cover a wide range of ages, such as 5 to 10 or 11 to 16. But, from what I remember, kids mature through the book world fast. And by the time you’re old enough to be a member of the Baby-sitters Club, you no longer read the Baby-sitters Club.
I didn’t know about Beta readers back then, if they even exited. But I definitely needed somebody who knew about my target audience to give me some feedback, even if they weren’t specifically my target audience. And I wish I had taken the time to have gotten some of that crucial feedback.
Self-publishing in the 2000s
Kindle Direct Publishing launched one month before I graduated from college. So, it was a brand new program that brought convenience and speed to the publishing world.
I spent over a year writing, editing and querying before deciding to go the self-publishing route. And while I read up on the process, I can’t say I knew what to expect.
First off, trying to edit your own work is like scratching an itch you can’t reach. You’re never going to get it all. There’s always going to be a typo, a formatting error, or even major continuity issues that you’re going to miss. So, while I must have gone over the entire manuscript 10 times, I continually was fixing mistakes that I would catch.
I was also in a hurry when it came to formatting. That meant shrugging my shoulders if a page was misaligned or a line was not spaced right.
I used a program called Create Space to format the book. They would then ship it off to Amazon where it would go live on the day of my choice, and they would handle all of the printing and other costs, for a large cut of the sales, of course.
I really wasn’t out to make a fortune my first run, but I also didn’t realize that, not only was my book getting thrown onto a mountain of other self-published titles, but I was also a nobody whose name would not catch people’s attention.
My target audience also wasn’t online shopping at 11 years old. It was their parents who would have to discover my book. So, I started marketing to them, listing my books on free indie webpages, doing author interviews on indie book publishing websites, and creating my own free and poorly designed blog to try to draw interest from potential buyers.
However, free publicity will only get you so far. You have to spend some money if you want to market well. And if you are too afraid of not making your money back, it probably means that your product won’t sell.
Design errors
One part of my product that wasn’t doing me any favors was my cover design. This book went through three covers before landing on my current one.
The first was just a (poorly taken) picture of the front of my parents’ house with my name and the title, The Stable House, embedded over top of it. Knowing that it was a terrible cover, I then went into Paint one night and banged out an even worse cover featuring Heidi’s bedroom with a bunch of poorly drawn objects on it that represent some of the events that take place in the book.
Finally, I turned to Fiverr, a website where you could hire someone to do a number of creative services for only $5.00. These days, I see that there are tiered levels of services that start at $20 for book cover design. Still, even shelling out $5.00 felt like an investment back then.
The third cover came out much better. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind but such a major improvement that I figured it was good enough.
That “good enough” attitude is not a good one to have when you’ve spent all of this time writing a book. Every element needs to be “just right” instead of “good enough.”
That cover is the first thing that readers see. So, if it looks sloppy and thrown together, people will pass it up. You have to take it seriously if you want to be taken seriously.
Final thoughts on self-publishing
And finally, I should have kept in mind that this was a practice run. Getting praise throughout school for my writing didn’t mean that I was Harper Lee and was going to put out a best seller my first time out of the gate.
I should have gone in with the attitude to just get to the finish line. It didn’t hurt to self-publish, but in the back of my head, I really thought that it was going to get me noticed.
What has gotten me noticed is putting in my 10,000 hours, writing four more books, and slowing down and making sure that everything is as I want it.
Now, the series that I’m working on is one that I can be proud of. There’s always going to be that doubt where I wonder if I made all the right choices for the story, and I’m constantly getting new ideas to add to the story.
But my experience is paying off as this series has gotten multiple full manuscript request as s well as two acceptances from publishers which did not work out. However, I’m a lot more patient, my work is a lot more polished, and I have hope that earning the title of traditionally published author is right around the corner.
Are you a self-published author? What mistakes did you make your first time around? What advice do you have for others who are planning to self-publish a book? If you are about to self-publish for the first time, what questions do you have about the process? Leave your answers/questions in the comments below.
Buy it!
Buy a copy of my first novel, The Stable House, here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
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