Lessons In Publishing a Novella
It’s been a little over a month since the release of The Light Keeper; the short story that became a novella that sort of swept me up and demanded to be published. I started writing in July, and expected it to be about six thousand words. By the end it was about three times as long, was being edited by a team of three and was being released on Amazon Kindle. Somehow, this story rooted itself into my heart and grew as an entity of its own.
At first I fought the short story a bit- I tried to keep it contained. Eventually I decided to lean into it and let it be a learning experience. Ultimately I was going to have to learn how editing a book worked, and cover design, and digital formatting… and the entire process of Kindle Direct Publishing looked like a mountain of its own. I reasoned that sorting through all of these things with a lower stakes work like the novella would make more sense. I could give things a try in a chill environment, learn how everything worked and then when I went to publish the series I would have a better idea of what I was doing.
All of this, of course, assumes that I would provide myself with a reasonable deadline. Or that I will have researched most of this process ahead of time and had vendors lined up and understood how everything worked. None of these things happened. I chose an arbitrary “drop dead” date of three weeks, and then threw myself into free-fall.
Now, I am an immensely blessed and lucky person. I have an amazing community of friends who have reached their arms out and endeavored to catch me at every step of this journey. One night, about two days before I needed to submit the book to the press, I had four friends working with me in a google doc. Everyone was reading for something different; narrative voice, grammatical errors, plot, redundancies, while I zoomed around the document making changes. Most of the best parts of the novella came out of feedback from this editing team. They challenged me, they lifted me up, they made the story better.
In the end the greatest lesson I learned in publishing this novella is to rely on the generosity and love of others. It is so difficult to be vulnerable and show an unfinished creative project to another person. It’s even more difficult to admit that the criticism that you’re receiving might actually be valid. But putting aside my ego, opening my mind to learning and listening to others’ feedback gave me the opportunity to grow as a writer.
It also needs to be said that there are excellent resources and tools available for Indie Authors. Finding community in a Discord server was integral to answering questions that I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to Google. Online tools like Canva Pro and Unsplash allowed me to create semi-passable graphic designs for the novella despite not really having a steady hand with design. An invaluable tool that I cannot recommend enough for other Indie Authors is Reedsy. I used the Reedsy BookEditor tool to format and typeset the novella to prepare it for printing and for its digital formatting and publication files. They also have so many how-to guides that I was able to navigate the process with a fair amount of ease despite the late-stage sleep deprivation and general air of panic that I had assumed by that point.
If I could leave a future Indie Author with any last bit of advice, it would be this; you have resources. You might not realize it, but there is a robust community of creatives and writers who want you to succeed, and are willing to hold out their hands to you to help you if you ask.
Also don’t try to publish a novella in three months. Just don’t.
If you’d like to check out The Light Keeper for yourself, it’s currently free on Kindle Unlimited until 1/31/23! If you’d like to get access to early announcements for upcoming projects, sign up for my newsletter! You can also support my work and get exclusive behind-the-scenes goodies by becoming a Patreon supporter!
Want to read more? Check out my other blog posts: Book Release & the Emotional Turmoil of Being Seen and The Terror of Editors
Image Credit: Glenn Carstens Peters from Unsplash