Writing My First Book:

 

In 2009, I created five goals for myself:

• Become more social

• Find a job

• Get a girlfriend

• Learn to drive

• Write a book

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All of them seemed like achievable goals except the last one, but I put it there because I was three years out of high school, and I enjoyed writing, so I thought, Why not make the last goal a challenge? While I attempted to check off the boxes of the first 4 goals, only one of them, find a job, was checked off. As I stared at the last one, I thought it was worth a shot to at least try. What was I going to write about? I had been writing poetry for a few years, and I was into horror. Since Edgar Allan Poe is a big inspiration of mine, I settled on a book of horror poetry. I had already written fifteen horror poems to that point, so for two weeks, I sat down and created thirty-five more. I now had fifty horror poems that would become my first book. I considered these poems to be my masterpiece, so I went with that, and then I thought of macabre since it’s a variation of the word horror. After saying it a few times in my head, I said it out loud, and it was there at my kitchen table that my first book, The Macabre Masterpiece: Poems of Horror and Gore, was created.

 

The Hard Reality of Publishing:

The next step was getting it published. Being young and naive, I did a quick Google search and went with one of the first publishing companies I came across. What I didn’t know at the time was that this company was a vanity press, a publisher that charges authors to publish their books with little to no regard for quality of any kind, along with excessively high marketing fees and poor royalties. My first big red flag was when I accidentally spelled Macabre as Macabe, and no one corrected it. When they showed me how it would look, I noticed and immediately told them to fix it. After they agreed to publish my book, the madness ensued. I began to notice errors that I had made and formatting issues, but the company wanted to charge me a ridiculous fee; the same fee regardless of the number of errors I found. Their way of promoting my book was showing me “deals” that I could do, which would have cost between $300-500, and sometimes thousands. I was devastated and wanted out. I reached out and explained the situation, and in return, I received the most unprofessional emails I’ve ever come across in my life. They threatened to pull my book, claimed I kept begging for free stuff, and so on. I then did some research and talked with some people, and got in touch with a team that was running a small civil suit against the very company I was trying to get out of.

 

The Light at the End of the Tunnel:

In 2013/2014, as part of the small civil suit, I was able to get out of my contract with them, and my book and I were finally free. I immediately looked into alternatives to publishing companies and came across CreateSpace, which was an Amazon self-publishing program. I did my research and went with them, and republished The Macabre Masterpiece, giving it a new lease on life. While I will never know how much the book made in those four years, I am proud to say that the book has gone on to become:

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• A five-time #1 most downloaded book for Contemporary Poetry

• A two-time #1 most downloaded book for American Poetry

• A one-time #1 most downloaded book for Poetry Anthologies on Amazon

• Highest grossing book from royalties

 

Ever since going with self-publishing, I haven’t looked back. I’m proud of myself for not giving up when most would have. While I haven’t been the most successful indie author by any stretch, I would much rather be where I am right now, struggling with promoting and marketing on my own, than to be under a vanity press that ruled with an iron fist and sent me and my book to library purgatory. Being a self-published indie author is good and bad. The good part is you’re the captain of your own ship. You have control over how your book is created, what goes in it, and what it looks like. The bad part is you’re on your own when promoting and marketing, and getting your name out there isn’t easy, especially if you’re on a small budget. I’ve come a long way from when I first began back in 2009, but I can definitely say it shaped me into the writer I am today and gave me the motivation to not only not give up but to be proud that I am an indie author.