It’s a surprisingly wonderful and not weird feeling when someone actually enters your brain, takes some of your discombobulated thoughts, straightens them out into nice organized pasta-like strands, and then publishes a whole long article about them. About your thoughts!

Jessica Park

Jessica Park

In this case, it was Jessica Park who took all my confusing, conflicted, insecure, angry thoughts and turned them into a perfectly clear, rational, even celebratory article about the glory of self publishing.

The publishing debut of ON GRACE hasn’t gone as planned. My efforts at having an agent sign me didn’t go so well. No need to sugar-coat it at this point (what with the likes of Jessica Park shouting the advantages (advantages!) of self publishing) — the efforts failed. But there was a lot of smiling upon me. Lots of those agents actually took the time to tell me, in their rejection letters, that my book was really good. Good writing. Good characters. Good story. It just wasn’t good enough to sell to a publisher looking for a best-seller in the over-saturated women’s fiction/chick-lit genre. And I get that. Yeah, I’m bitter. But I get that.

So after keeping at it a little longer, because I thought I wouldn’t be a real author with a real book without a real agent and publisher, I decided that I would go the self-pub route. I am now part of the CreateSpace machine that is allowing real authors with real books the opportunity to sell them even though a real NY publisher doesn’t want to. And I’m really excited about it.

So ON GRACE is officially on its way to Amazon. I’m hoping for a mid-June launch. There will be hard copies. There will be e-books. There will be a launch party. There will be consistently updated blog posts. And there will be loads of cupcakes for my kids who have been celebrating my success along the way.

So, thank you Jessica Park. Thank you because, as my good friend Meat Loaf once said, “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth.”