Elizabeth Maria Naranjo on Traditional vs Self-Publishing: My Experience With Both

In 2014, a few months shy of my 39th birthday, one of my greatest wishes came true. The book I had secretly written in stolen moments and submitted privately to agents and publishers was released as a beautiful trade paperback by a small press out of Utah. 

I had the standard bookstore launch party with cupcakes and coffee, book swag and prizes, and a signing table where I dedicated to friends and family over fifty copies of my debut novel. It was an experience I will always cherish but am unlikely to repeat. 

My latest book, The House on Linden Way, is self-published. There are many reasons why I didn’t continue the traditional route—I spent years focused on short stories; I pursued agents and a Big 5 publisher rather than submit again to my small press; I stubbornly wrote hard-to-sell books like novellas, story collections, and cozy mysteries with teenage sleuths.

Yet once I experimented with self-publishing, quietly uploading a manuscript to Amazon’s Kindle Vella in the summer of 2021, I made a surprising discovery: going indie was fun, and every bit as rewarding. 

While traditional publishing gifted me with status, accolades, and bookstore placement—however brief—self-publishing has given me freedom, control, and a sense of adventure. Here are some more comparisons between the two:

Editing

When it comes to editing, my experience on the different publishing paths has been very much the same: the editor I was assigned as a traditionally published author is freelance now, and I hired her for edits on Linden Way. Before reaching her, both books were extensively edited through several rounds with critique partners. 

Marketing

Marketing has been similar too. For The Fourth Wall, I organized and paid for my launch party, my blog tour, a festival signing, and two Goodreads giveaways. For Linden Way, I’ve also organized and paid for a blog tour and a Goodreads giveaway, although I happily skipped the in-person events; I enjoy online marketing (like this tour!) much more.  

Cover/Title

I had a better experience with my small press than most traditionally published authors in that I was given a voice on both my cover design and my title—things that authors typically have no say in. Still, there was always the understanding that final decisions were not up to me. I do love the way The Fourth Wall turned out, but I prefer being directly involved in the process of choosing a book designer and working together toward the finished product. 

Profits

Between the two publishing paths, self-publishing has by far been the more lucrative, pulling in enough profits for me to pay for professionally designed covers and proofreading for three separate projects. In the fourteen months since uploading my first indie effort, I’ve made four times as much than with my traditionally published book, which was released eight years ago. 

The choice to pursue traditional or self-publishing is a very personal one, and there is no right or wrong answer. Having experienced both, however, my own choice is clear. Despite having a good relationship with my publisher and being forever grateful to them for launching my debut, I’ve learned I’m an indie author at heart. 

Elizabeth Maria Naranjo is the award-winning author of The Fourth Wall (WiDo Publishing, 2014). Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Brevity Magazine, Superstition Review, Fractured Lit, The Portland Review, Hunger Mountain, Hospital Drive, Reservoir Road, Literary Mama, Motherwell, and a few other places. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essay, and Best of the Net. All links to Elizabeth's work can be found on her website at elizabethmarianaranjo.com.

A Hell of a Lot of Research on Heaven

Research for a novel? Not my interest. That’s why I decided to write fantasy. You can make everything up, right? No historical accuracy issues, no one to call me out on how a police detective or a doctor works, no worries about geographical blunders. Perfect!

I was so naïve. 

Growing up in a Christian church, I’d always had an interest in angels. White robes, halos, harps and beautiful, bright, shining beings. I got this. Only, I wanted to write about Lucifer, before his fall from Heaven. The story—a version of it—existed, obviously, so I figured I’d read up on it as a starting point, then jump to my own ideas from there. Quick and dirty and get it done. 

I started with the Bible, completely misremembering how little information there is on the battle of the Heavens. Three measly Bible verses. (Revelation 12 7-9). And it said that Satan, personified as a dragon, was thrown down to Earth with all his angels. Earth?? I thought he was cast into Hell! 

More research: Paradise Lost, the epic poem by 17th century English poet John Milton. (Okay, okay, reading excerpts and summaries…) Ah, so this is where our more common perceptions of Lucifer and his battle against God came from. Maybe?

But Milton talks about other angels, too: Uriel, Raphael, Abdiel, Michael. I knew of Michael, had heard of Raphael, but who were the others? 

Which led me to more and more resources digging into angels’ names, their meanings, and the functions or roles of each angel. My pared down list? 82 names. (Did you know “Samael” is also an angelic name of Satan? Or that the angel Kasbeel tried to get from Michael the secret name of God to use in an oath so he’d have power over the other angels? Or that the angel Manit has the power to grant wishes?)

And that led me down a rabbit hole of research places in Heaven (according to the lore, East of First Heaven is where Gabriel resides; Seventh Heaven surrounds the throne of God and contains what is good and beautiful). I discovered classes and types of angels (Angels of Mercy, Angels of Destruction, Choirs of Angels, Angels of Sanctification); I came across the hierarchy of Angels (the highest being Seraphim, the lowest simply common Angels). I found different creatures (deva who were nature spirits, djinn who were created from smokeless fire, sirens and phoenixes.) 

My research came from books, websites, articles, magazines. Since this wasn’t an academic project, I didn’t care about credibility. If I found a piece of lore interesting, whether it had been corroborated by another source or not, I jotted it down. Anything and everything to do with angels, demons, heaven and hell. 

I was hooked! I loved rooting for little-known details; I was addicted to searching out more and more and more (just one more link, one more website…)

I kinda forgot I was supposed to be crafting a novel out of all of this. 

By the time I realized I should actually get to my story, I ended up overwhelming myself. I wanted to put in everything! Even as I started writing my manuscript, I ended up tying myself into knots. 

It was only when my book coach reminded me of a fundamental tenet of writing that I began to focus: build your world to serve your story. 

So I restarted. I focused on Evangeline, Lucifer’s daughter, and what I wanted her journey to be. Then and only then did I start to shape her world, a world I’m proud of creating. A world worthy of Evangeline and Michael and Gabriel and Lucifer and all my other characters.

I pared down, stripped away, then added my own elements (it is fantasy, after all!) Pages and pages and pages of research sat unused. I cringed at first. Then I smiled. 

I have a lot to work with when I write the sequel.

Jen Braaksma is a writer and book coach with a decade of experience as a journalist and nearly two as a high school English and writing teacher. Her first book, Evangeline’s Heaven, launched August 30, 2022 from SparkPress. Follow her on Facebook (@JenBraaksma), Twitter (@JenBraaksma), and Instagram (@jenbraaksmabookcoach) or visit her website.

The Ruby Slippers, Rejection, and Me

I still can’t make it through The Wizard of Oz. Watching the film as a small child, the Wicked Witch of the West traumatized me for life. 

However, I love the phrase, “there’s no place like home,” and I adore Dorothy’s ruby slippers and what they signify. 

One part of Dorothy’s journey is about learning to trust herself. Through a series of unpredictable, hair-raising moments, she relies on inner strength to comfort the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow. Yet if Dorothy had been interviewed mid-adventure, she would have denied that she carried the means to her own rescue. It took a journey through Oz to realize she owned the power to return home; she just needed to trust her instincts.

Dorothy inspires me because, at its core, writing is about trusting our writerly instincts. That trust must co-exist and grow in the face of rejection, writing’s older sibling. Every writer gets rejections, and most writers get a hell of a lot of them. I will never learn to let rejections roll off, but I have come to understand they’re an integral member of my writing family. Rejections challenge us to trust our writing. And let’s admit it, they can offer sensible editing suggestions worthy of attention.

It was 16 years between when I signed with my first agent and when I sold my debut novel. During the interim, I had plenty of publication acceptances, thankfully, but I could not sell any of the several novels I had been writing. During those long years, I developed new and creative ways to worry about publishing: I never got an MFA (never mind that I graduated law school); I didn’t know the right people. But those concerns were too facile. The worst kinds of worries are the ones turned inward—I can’t do this; I’m not good enough. Those worries are insidious and debilitating. 

Vacillating between foolhardy optimism and despair, I went to hear the great Irish novelist Anne Enright speak. She said (I paraphrase): “Ask any debut novelist what number novel their debut really is. For most of them, it’s their sixteenth.” That sounded right to me. Between drafts, revisions, and novels in the drawer, I easily topped that number. 

Armed with Enright’s wisdom, and the support of friends, family, and my writing community, who told me not to give up, I began to realize I was wearing Dorothy’s ruby slippers. The rejections didn’t stop coming, and I didn’t sell a novel for a long time after that. But I started to trust my writing instincts. And I stopped looking for rational patterns in my rejections. 

I flipped the script and began to discover that I might already know how to make my manuscripts stronger, that I owned the means to critique and revise my work. I started following my favorite writing advice: aim for 100 rejections a year. Although I continued to benefit from feedback from others, I started to acknowledge (to myself) that not everyone knew more about my book than I did. I had opinions, and I was entitled to them, and they might strengthen my work if I could learn to listen to them. Maybe I did have the means to figure out how to bring a manuscript home. 

It may take longer than we can imagine, but sometimes if we click our heels, we realize that we are there already. 

Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on September 20, 2022. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets.