My writing & publishing journey this financial year

Hi everyone, thank you for all your share your link and make money spam, but I need to go it alone as a sole trader for a little longer to claim any forthcoming success. Writing up a summary for my Marie Lukic sole trader should prove a novelty.  The most exciting event is certainly becoming an official publisher of my own novels, which is a breakthrough.  Attending Book Town also proved a wonderful experience. On the coal face, I connected with many potential customers and a few influential and intriguing authors. The crowning glory is that my Kingdom of Nerada novels have thus far received wonderful reviews.

I need to clarify a few things though. I’m certainly in favour of approaching regular publishers when possible, and did approach a few myself about The Kingdom of Nerada before I launched on this path to independent self-publishing for real. Certainly I have independently published in draft before, but this time, I intended to break in with refined products. The story of manuscript rejection is unique to each writer. One publisher I provided a very early draft, which I printed with accompanying photo research illustrations. Sadly, my novel at this stage was certainly relatively embryonic and so justly rejected. As writers we expect publishers to engage in our personal vision, but sadly many publishers are hooked into providing for their own ‘stable of writers’.

We as authors of our own major projects expect success to arrive sooner rather than later–the trouble is–when is later too late? I declared after a second publisher responded to my query with the words ‘We do not intend to pursue this project’ that it was time for me to dance in my own space, blow my own trumpet and pursue my life as a brilliant solo writer and self-publisher, with a particular panache for dumb and funny.  Since then I have learned that many writers send their work to hundreds of publishers and agents before achieving success. The problem is I despise filling in forms and many publishers, I have heard, requires a different submission process, so the act of finding a publisher other than myself requires more patience and time than writing the actual novel. Oh certainly, I am prone to exaggeration, but each publishing house should be able to detect my inimitable talent within a few words as I’ve been training since I was four. Besides I write plain English, which is accessible to the entire world of English speakers. The underlying issue is that when we write a successful novel and expect to be pursued by millions of publishers, nothing happens. Is this the role of the writer in the modern era, or the writer of writers down the ages? I once believed my experience unique, but now see myself as a microcosm of a far wider phenomenon. One person once asked whether novels have any relevance whatsover? Of course they do, especially when they inform our lives with wisdom and enable reflection.

The fact is though, in Kingdom of Nerada, I have portrayed a world underpinned by a serious quest, but at its heart, amusing and intriguing, with such delightfully original characters that anyone who engages will immediately be struck by them, despite the subtle subtext of hypocrisy that underpins many of our lives. We strive for consistency, but this dragon world is full of conflict, like many fantasies.

So now it is time to fill in a summary of my activities this financial year. I am extremely happy with my two products and delighted with Amazon’s sales rank. More work to go though to refine my other titles and present them to the world. Thank you to the multitude of bookshops, libraries and retailers whom honestly try to represent and sell writers’ novels.