As you've published several novels, I wanted to ask, what was the road to publication like??
Aha, well. "Idiosyncratic" might be the best word, but the long story short is: there are now a lot more tools for doing it yourself, which is what I ended up doing. However, the saga is below:
I've been writing since the age of seven or so, and my mom worked in a bookstore/knew publishers' reps, who read some of my teenage stuff and were impressed by it enough to send it to their editors/acquisition departments. (Funny story: I wrote a vampire novel which got sent to Little Brown... who liked it but turned it down because, wouldntcha know, they had just published some new book called Twilight and didn't think they needed "another" vampire novel. So there is some alternate timeline out there in which my YA vampire novel became Twilight instead, and I am now rich and famous and have my own memes on Tumblr or whatever. THANKS FOR NOTHING, STEPHENIE MEYER. For the record, I still think my book was much better than hers.)
...Anyway. That didn't end up panning out, but I got my first literary agent in college via the old-fashioned query letter method. Sadly this agent was pretty much a bust and if I had known anything about anything, I would have probably realized that sooner. Then I wrote a major historical novel during my junior year abroad (2008-09) and started writing historical fiction/studying history more generally (there is a long story behind all this, but never mind). Then I got another literary agent, this time because they became aware of me through my ASOIAF fic The North Remembers and took the initiative to reach out to me. This one was actually an agent and knew what they were doing, but various editors didn't end up biting on what we shopped out, because trad publishing is often dumb in that way.
Eventually I decided, since this was when Amazon was first launching Kindle self-publishing, that I would just go ahead and do it myself, which is what I did. I paid someone to do the covers for me, but I did all the formatting/file preparation myself. I also got in contact with someone who did virtual book tours for historical fiction and hired her to do some promo for me. This actually worked out really well, because my sales took off to the point where I was able to pay for the entire first year of my PhD with money from my book sales. Heck, even now, I tend to get a few bucks from Amazon per month for a book I published ten years ago, even if it's no longer anywhere near enough to live on.
Now we have more expansive self-publishing options, including Draft2Digital (formerly Smashwords), Lulu, etc., and that is what I use. I am now pretty good at designing my own covers and formatting my own paperbacks/hardcovers to a professional-looking standard, now that print on demand is widespread and I can offer hard copies instead of just e-books. D2D is handy because it will automatically distribute your book to multiple sales channels/platforms (i.e. Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc.), and there's also a Global Distribution option on Lulu (though I find that D2D works better for overall reach, but Lulu does produce very nice hard-copy books). So by this point, I can sell pretty much worldwide, both e-books and paperback/hard copies, and not have to just rely on Amazon Kindle. There are some independently published authors who spend their entire time desperately doing promotion, because social media is a scam etc etc, but I don't necessarily feel that I need to spend all my time doing that: my books are there and out in the world, people can buy them if they want, I still get fairly steady money (not a lot, but y'know, an extra $50 a month is good for a broke academic), and it allows me to have total creative control/final say over what I want to put out. I can move something into production pretty quickly when it's done and ready to go, and while I might try the trad-pub route again at some point, it's such a hassle and this works fine for me.
(Also: you can now buy all my books on Bookshop.org, the main indie Amazon-rival platform, and as someone who loves Bookshop.org, this is very important to me. So yes.)
