A Path to Indie Publishing With Anita Saxena

by Anita Saxena

Not the Trip I Had Planned For

I started writing seriously in 2004. By “seriously” I mean teaming up with an agent and pursuing traditional publishing. I dreamt of multiple contracts with Penguin Random House or Harper Collins. Ten years later, I signed with an agent. I thought I had made it. We were on a journey together for six years, but never sold a book.

A Difficult Decision

Something needed to change. At the time I didn’t know what that change would look like. After months of reflection, I made the difficult decision to leave my agent. Doubt clouded my mind. Would another agent want to represent me? Was I good enough to sell a book? Was my writing lacking? I completely abandoned my dreams. I didn’t write for months. I stopped reading. I unplugged from anything related to the publishing industry.

Finding Encouragement

Six months later, I connected with a local writing group and shared pages of a project I had started but never finished. Being in a creative setting with others gave me the encouragement I needed to finish the manuscript, revise, and start querying again. I received a couple full requests and stalked my email for that offer of representation. And then the positive rejections started to come.

Impressive query and sample.

            You have a pitch-perfect middle grade voice.

            I enjoyed reading…but…

Changing Paths

As I waited to hear back from the last agent who had requested a full, I realized that even if the agent signed me as a client and sold the book the very next day (which rarely happens in the slow world of publishing), my middle grade book, Double Axel or Nothing, wouldn’t release at the right time. I’ve been a competitive figure skater for over thirty years and a figure skating coach for over two decades. Interest in our sport peaks every Olympic year. There was no way my book would be out by February 2022. The traditional publishing process can take up to two years.

I debated for weeks. Whenever I decided to stick with what I knew—traditional publishing, I kept seeing signs pointing me towards the Indie path. The largest one being, when I opened my mailbox and saw that the back cover of Skating magazine featured a full-page advertisement for an independently published novel about figure skating.

I spent days drafting an email to the agent considering my manuscript. I wanted to be respectful of her time and the opportunity to potentially work with her. But at the same time, if she hadn’t read my manuscript yet, then my intention was to withdraw my submission. The response I received from the agent was nothing but encouraging. She hadn’t read my manuscript yet, understood my reasoning, and even told me to let her know when the book releases so she can buy a copy!  

How to Self-Publish A Book?

 I knew absolutely nothing about self-publishing as I had pursued traditional publishing for the past 17 years, so I turned to the internet. I knew that I wanted my book to be indistinguishable from a book that had been traditionally published. I needed a stunning cover, a strong editorial and copy edit process, and a way to get my book on all platforms in a streamlined manner. After considerable research, I came across an article in Publisher’s Weekly. I looked into Gatekeeper Press and scheduled a phone call. After speaking with Rob, I decided a hybrid publishing path was the best for me. I used my contacts through the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and reached out to freelance editor Deborah Halverson. She had helped me with projects in the past and had an astute editorial eye. She recommended several copy editors that she had worked with in the past and I found one that I thought would be a good fit for me.

The Cover Dilemma

My author manager at Gatekeeper Press and I knew that we needed to get started on cover design right away. Problem was that the ball was in my court. I had always imagined that when my book sold via the traditional path the publishing house would choose an artist who’d read my book and create an eye-catching cover. Well, that’s not how it works in Indie publishing. I had to come up with the vision and communicate it to the artist. It took longer than we expected and I had to push the official release date of Double Axel or Nothing to March 1st. But it was definitely worth the wait. I am so excited about the cover and hope readers love it too.

Find Double Axel or Nothing wherever you like to purchase books, ebooks, or request it at your local library.

Anita lives in Alabama with her husband, two old lady cats, and a ten month old kitten who loves to terrorize them. She is a connoisseur of hot tea and popsicles. When she’s not writing, you can find her on the ice figure skating, coaching, or directing the non-profit athletic organization, Magic City Theatre on Ice. Anita hangs out at Instagram and Facebook.

Re-visiting Rage as Writing Fuel

by SJ Sindu

In 2016, I wrote a blog post for Shade Mountain Press about the rage-trance under which I wrote two essays that appeared in their The Female Complaint anthology, and later in my first chapbook, I Once Met You But You Were Dead. The rage-trance, as I defined it, was the cycle of writing fueled by anger.

I was very angry in those days—angry at my parents, for trying to coerce me into an arranged marriage; angry at the world, for its abysmal treatment of queer people like me; angry at myself, for buying into dominant narratives about what my life and body needed to look like.

I still have rage inside me, but my anger has morphed into outrage. I don’t know how you can live in these times and not be outraged. I’m outraged that so many governments are doing nothing about climate change. I’m outraged that the onus for compassionate and low-waste consumption has been put squarely on us as individuals instead of where it should be—on corporations, the biggest producers of waste and pollution. I’m outraged that the rich are getting richer while most people struggle to survive.

But what I want to highlight is the difference between anger and outrage. Anger is self-destructive, and can eat you up if you’re not careful. Tying your writing to anger can at first be a great source of fuel, but eventually it becomes unsustainable—either because you have to keep producing anger and can’t, or because in the battle over your soul, anger has won.

What I argue for now is to fuel your writing with outrage. Anger can consume you, but outrage buoys you up. Anger is indiscriminately wide-lens, but outrage is focused fury. Anger lashes out, but outrage can aim true.

Let me be clear. When Twitter mobs attack activists fighting for a cause the mob believes in—that’s anger, pure and destructive. When organized Twitter activists push against soda companies stealing water from villages in South Asia and Africa—that’s outrage. There’s a difference.

Anger might have fueled my first chapbook, but it’s outrage that fuels my second, Dominant Genes. The rage is palpable—it is there in between the lines, gluing together the disparate and varied pieces of the collection. The collection features lyric and personal essays along with poetry, so cohesion was of great concern to me. I think it ultimately worked because there are thematic links throughout the chapbook—matrilineal heritage, love and marriage expectations, feminist resistance, queer exploration—but also because all these themes are linked by my approach of outrage.

So if you’re writing from a place of anger, I would urge you to turn that anger into outrage. Let the anger mature. Don’t let it consume you. Rather, use it to create art that does good in the world, even if that good is to hold up a mirror to someone who needs it.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels, two hybrid chapbooks, and two forthcoming graphic novels. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award and her second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, was published in November 2021. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Sindu’s newest work, a hybrid chapbook titled Dominant Genes, was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2022. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram.

My Neighbor Is A Serial Killer

by Leanne Kale Sparks

Let me start this story by saying I live next door to the nicest couple. The wife and I have great conversations. The husband is very calm, soft-spoken, and all-around nice guy. They have four adorable little girls, God bless them. I raised three girls and count my blessings that I still have hair on my head and (so far) avoided a psych ward. Anyway, my office is upstairs in our house and has a balcony. When I sit out there, I can see into my neighbor’s backyard. There is a swing set, a trampoline, and various toys strewn about. There is also a rather large shed.

Now, my neighbor was spending a great deal of time in the shed—so much that I took note of the long days and nights he was in there. He always closed the door upon entering, and the girls were not allowed inside. Once I witnessed one of the girls trying to open the door only to be told—rather sternly—that she could not enter.

It was odd. Disconcerting, even.

The calm, even-keeled man actually raised his voice loud enough for me to hear as I sat on my balcony. To say that piqued my interest is an understatement. I am, after all, a crime thriller writer and pseudo-expert of murderers. There is not a crime show—foreign or domestic—that I have not watched. I do copious amounts of research on the subject. Attend conferences where my fellow crime writers and I learn how to properly excavate buried bodies, various types of gunshot wounds and what they do to a body. How to properly breach a dwelling.

I know a thing or two about murder. And kidnappers.

So, of course, I was able to determine my neighbor was a serial killer. My powers of observation have never failed me (that I know of) so there was really no doubt about it. Shite was about to get real. My life as a fiction writer was about to transition to true crime novelist.

When I told the above story to my fellow crime writer friends, we all agreed my neighbor was up to something heinous in his shed. Right under the nose of his wife and little girls. Most of my closest writer compadres, as well as readers of crime fiction and true crime novels are women. We tend to soak up a great mystery, and the more ghastly the crime scene, disturbing the killer, and twisty the plot, the more eager we are to roll up our sleeves, get in the muck, and discover whodunnit.

But why is that? Why are so many women drawn to serial killer thrillers, murder mysteries, and crime, in general? Well, I’m no expert, but I have actually thought about this and come up with a couple of answers.

First and foremost, women are problem-solvers. Give us a problem, and we will work out a solution. Getting a lipstick stain off a collar, tracking our teenager’s social media without them knowing. Determining if the neighbor is a serial killer. No matter the problem, we are game to find a solution. Spread out all the puzzle pieces and see how they fit together. The more impossible the mystery is to solve, the more we dive into the deep end of the evidence pool searching out plausible—and perhaps implausible--explanations.

Second—well, let’s face it, most violence seems to be directed at women. Sit down and watch a day of Discover ID or a few episodes of Dateline, and nearly every single episode is about some sort of violence against women. Stalker, jilted lover, husband wanting out of the marriage without paying child support, or a serial killer. They kidnap, rape, torture, and/or murder women. There is a kinship there.

We’ve all felt the hairs on the back of our necks stand on end when we feel someone looking at us. Watching. And we are never quite sure if it is a warning of something dangerous on the horizon. Or the fear of walking alone at night, always wondering when someone will jump out of the bushes, run up behind, or come around a corner and catch us off guard. Our imaginations can probably conjure the worst possible outcomes—assaulted, violated, shot, or stabbed and left for dead.

We have compassion for the victims. We feel their pain because—by the grace of God—we are not them. We want to solve these crimes along with the investigators, anxious for the families to find even a modicum of justice for their lost loved ones. We cheer for victims upon hearing their stories of survival. We are empathetic. Sympathetic.

And we take notes.

We learn from the mistakes of others: Trust that gut instinct. Be rude to the guy who wants to give you a ride home giving you the creeps. Say no. Say it again. Keep saying it as loud as you can. Fight back with everything you have. Never feel like you are just being paranoid. Call your dad to pick you up from the party you were forbidden to go to even though you have been drinking. Your life is precious. And it may depend on how you react in situations where there is a threat. Teach your daughters to do the same.

I love to write murder mysteries. I research. I conjure what I believe to be the unimaginable. And I want to believe that is true.

But there are some sick people out there doing abominable things to others.

So, back to my neighbor the serial killer. I was on the balcony again yesterday, watching the children play in the back yard when the father came out of the shed. He called for his wife and rounded up the four girls. When the door swung open, I could see inside. Fairy lights glowed. There was a small table with pint-sized chairs, a plastic tea set as a centerpiece. Each girl picked out their spot and laughter soon filled the late afternoon air.

Turns out my serial killer was simply an awesome dad who sacrificed part of his work shed to give his daughters’ a playhouse.

But—I’m still going to keep my eye on him.

After a short career in law, Leanne Kale Sparks is returning to her first love—writing about murder, mayhem, and crime. Currently, she is an author with Crooked Lane Books and is working on a new series featuring an FBI agent hunting down her best friend’s murderer. The backdrop is the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the playground of her youth, and the place that will always be home. She currently resides in Texas with her husband and German Shepherd, Zoe.