The Making of a Cover

     My friend Maggie, an ammeter photographer, came over around noon today, camera in tow. We walked down a trail to a nearby lake and roamed until Maggie found a spot without a branch or a weed out of place. I crawled through what was very likely poison ivy-infested grass to get to a pile of rocks that looked like it was placed there for us.
     I stood there, looking out at the lake, imagining that I was the main character of my novel. I told myself that my best friend had just died and now I had to look out at the world and somehow make sense of it all, alone. Maggie was taking pictures of me from behind, so my acting probably did no good, but we managed to get two or three acceptable shots.
     Then we figured there was little left to do except photoshop my hair red, like my main character's. Being as inexperienced in graphic design as we were photoshop, this took about three hours and four cans of soda. Eventually, we achieved the shade I had envisioned and picked a font somewhere in between mystery novel and chic-lit.
     It turned out amazing and has only gotten me more excited for this whole process. I'm planning on publishing my novel through Amazon within the next few weeks and will probably charge somewhere around $2.99 for it. Here's the cover:

Self Publishing: Vain or Indie?

     So obviously (I say obviously because you would have already been informed by a post full of many exclamations) I have had little success in the publishing game. I have received seven rejection letters from agents I've queried and complete silence from the rest. It hasn't exactly been the highlight of my summer.

     Through pretty much the entirety of my writing process, people have been suggesting self publishing. I was always hesitant. I completely believed in the "vanity publishing" stereotype. Self publishing was for the writers who would rather blame greedy publishers than admit their own shortcomings. I was also afraid of pushing my writing out into the ibis of the word wide web, without an editor or an agent to provide a guiding light.

     But the article, "Self Publishing: Here to Stay?" by the Huffington Post changed my mind. Self publishing is not vain, it's indie. It offers writers creative freedom from commercialism. Some self-published books do go on to be very successful, but I have learned to think of my writing in a different way. What I want out of publishing is to give as many people as possible access to my writing and the indie press may be the way to do it.

Query Quirks

                The road to publishing can go to “Yay, this is the best book ever! Who wouldn’t want to publish me?” to “Oh my god, I wrote the worst thing ever and everybody knows it,” in three seconds. I have a completed manuscript for a Young Adult that I’ve been looking for an agent for. I’ll admit that I had barely sent out my query letter when I started looking online for clothes for my book tour. Six rejection letters later, I am feeling less optimistic.

                Rejection is normal in the publishing process. The first Harry Potter book was rejected by nine publishers. Gone with the Wind was rejected 38 times. I attended a book signing by Jay Asher a couple years ago. He said that his bestseller Thirteen Reasons Why was accepted by the thirteenth publisher (get it?) He also said that rejection letters all start to sound like bad break-up excuse after a while. There’s the “It’s not you; it’s me” (I am just not the right agent to represent your book,) the “There’s someone else” (Our agency is already representing a book on the same subject,) and the more or less straight forward “I don’t think you’re ready for a relationship yet” (Your book needs more work before it can be published.)  So far, I’ve only gotten the “It’s not you; it’s me” response but ask anyone who has ever heard this excuse. It’s hard not to think that it’s you.

                Meanwhile, as I sit and wait for responses from the other agents I queried, and there’s a good chance they won’t even respond, my creativity is being squashed. Normally, I would be using this summer to write the first draft of my next novel. But every time I try to write the first chapter of one of the millions of ideas I had while writing my last book, I lose my motivation after the first couple of pages. This is the part of writing that is usually my favorite, diving right in, typing away with reckless abandon. But now I’m stuck, unable to move onto the next project while I’m worried about my current manuscript getting picked up.

                So now I’m trying to push past that.Writing Forums is helping me revise my query and I’ve found a batch of new agents on AgentQuery.com (they also have examples of successful queries.) Hopefully I’ll have more luck this time around and be able to move forward with my writing. Until then, tea, yoga, and complaining on the internet is helping a lot.