Good evening folks,
I'm sure by now the handful of you who follow the blog have noticed our associated social media accounts have undergone a bit of a change. For a variety of reasons, we have chosen to go ahead and shift our social media presence to reflect our intended pen names for publication, resulting in us becoming known as Sam Thorne & Lauren Ivey. Among those reasons, one of them came from the idea of self publishing. In the event that we self publish, we wanted more marketable names as well as names not directly tied to us in the event we do decide to one day tackle traditional publishing.
The fact of the matter is that the first query we ever sent out was in May 2018. I'm sure every writer has researched success stories, finding accounts of published authors spending years querying and getting hundreds of rejections. Well, we are past the two year mark and well over a hundred rejections. We know these are for a variety of reasons. Agents know their market well before readers do -- that's their job. To know what will sell well in a year or two, because that's how long it takes to usually get a book on the shelf after they have offered representation to a writer.
The closest we ever got was a full manuscript request by an agent after attending a conference -- you may recall our excited blog post from that experience. Well, eleven months later, and we've received no response. We touched base with the agent a few months after the original Email, and with her permission even sent her an updated, more polished manuscript since she admitted she had not gotten to the manuscript yet. Over the next several months, we continued to nudge her, but never got a reply. It hurts to feel ghosted after finally thinking we had gotten our foot in the door.
Sam and I discussed self publishing off and on even before the fateful conference. It's an intimidating option. Many authors have had great success with self publishing, and many more have had little to show for it. I myself (Lauren) have been excruciatingly hesitant for years. When I originally became interested in publishing I was still in school and did an extensive research paper on the various methods of publishing. At the time, self publishing was seen as a taboo, a spit in the eye of brick and mortar publishing. Self published authors were looked down upon and there was heavy speculation that self publishing would permanently ruin your odds of ever becoming traditionally published. But times change, and while there are people in the market that don't play nice, that is why pen names exist. Many self published authors who make a living express the benefits in owning your own rights and controlling every aspect of your publication. Much of it is still a mystery to us, and I have absolutely no doubt that if we indeed jump into self publishing, we are going to land on our feet and promptly fall over while we figure out how it works.
This isn't exactly a "we are self publishing" announcement, but measures are being taken in anticipation of doing such. There are still queries out on the wind and we are still waiting to hear back from a couple publishers (that six month wait time is brutal) so things may always change. There are a lot of things to do prior to a launch, including finding an editor and getting a proper book cover, which cost a lot. Marketing and networking take up a lot of time, and between my full time management job and Sam's firefighting schedule, it's often times tough to find the time to get things done.
With that being said, we're working on it, and we'll keep you abreast of the situation as details unfold :)
-Lauren
