When I was 28, I read somewhere that if a person hasn’t written a full-length book by the end of their twenties it was extremely unlikely they ever would. I don’t remember the percentage given but it sounded dire to me. So, I immediately wrote my first novel. It was a paranormal action romance mixture and I recently re-read it and it isn’t half bad. The author’s rule of thumb is generally not to publish the first book you write and I never did. I did get that book finished before I turned 30 though which clearly averted disaster.
I didn’t finish my next book until about five years later. I did, however, write and produce several feature films so it wasn’t like I had stopped creating altogether. My second book was “The Chronicles of Quat: The Stone” which was traditionally published by a small press in 2014. That same company published the second book in the series “The Gryphon” in 2016. It was really encouraging to have a publishing company believe that my books were good enough to make money off of! Unfortunately, this was a pretty unstable time for publishing, with ebooks and other publishing changes that were going on, and that publishing company went out of business one week after they released “The Gryphon!” It would be an understatement to say it didn’t receive any promotion or support from the publisher.
It was incredibly depressing! Did you know most publishers aren’t interested in publishing books that have already been published? My two fantasy novels just languished on a shelf with no one knowing they existed. I stopped writing for a while. Then in 2018, I finished my first paranormal romance which had been laying around for a decade, “Shatterproof.”
This time I wasn’t going to entrust my books to anyone else, so I self-published “Shatterproof” and took back control of my “Quat” series and self-published those as well. This was a great decision for me. I loved having the ability to make all the decisions and to move as fast as I wanted. But I still had one large problem, how to let people know my books existed.
That is where we are now. After publishing my first book traditionally in 2014, I am finally committing, in 2026, to actually doing marketing, social media and publishing a newsletter every month — yes, you are a part of this final quest to master all aspects of self-publishing. Thank you for being a part of this moment. I know there are a zillion self-published authors out there and I inhabit a only teensy corner of the internet — but I will do my very best to bring you stories that you love, written by my own hand (never AI), and to be honest and transparent about this journey!
Let me leave you with this one thought — You are never too old to go after your dreams and to make changes that make your life better. Hold your loved ones close, take chances, and live a life you can be proud of.
