There is a particular kind of quiet I didn’t anticipate that happens after you click publish.
Not peaceful quiet. Not triumphant quiet. It’s the one where you hold your breath and try to steady your hands waiting to find out what happens next.
I published Merritt Ever After Book One of the Hudson Harbor Series and then I sat quietly on my couch with a cup of coffee for what felt like forever. I'm still trying to process all of it.
I want to tell you what it actually took to get here. I had a vision. I’m a planner so there was a solid plan. A “what could go wrong” kind of plan. And because I’m a planner, a “plan B” backup plan. I could tell you that everything went well. That would be a lie.
So let’s talk about the real version, with the formatting disasters and the lost pages and the very unsexy process of self-publishing a novel while also being a person with a life and a family, piles of laundry, and a refrigerator that needs to be cleaned and a persistent low-grade voice in the back of her head asking, but who do you think you are?
Let me paint you a picture.
It is late in the evening. I have a document I have looked at so many times the words have stopped being words. I am attempting to upload this document to Kindle Direct Publishing. I am learning, in real time, about trim size and bleed and mirror margins.
I did not know this going in. Or rather, I knew it abstractly and had not implemented it correctly. The KDP preview showed me pages that looked like my manuscript had been in some kind of accident, and I had to go back into my document and fix it. And then upload it again. And then check the preview again. And then find one more thing that was off.
There is a version of self-publishing discourse that makes this process sound seamless. And I think for some people, with some books, it is. This was not my experience. My experience was exhausting and humbling and involved more YouTube tutorials than I expected, and at the end of it I pressed publish with the full knowledge that I was making a leap of faith — that the proof on my screen and the physical book that would arrive on someone's doorstep were close, but not identical, and I had to trust the process.
I pressed publish anyway.
Now let’s chat about how this whole thing almost didn’t happen.
I wrote the outline and every draft of this book in Google Docs. It’s easy. It’s what I’m used to, and honestly I hate change. The final draft was written in a trusty Google Doc, you know the one that automatically saves your draft every few minutes. Quick aside, writing a book and formatting a book for publishing are two very different skill sets. And I quickly discovered that formatting a book in Google Docs was going to be a headache. Every reddit thread I visited, every indie author group I followed suggested that if you weren’t outsourcing the formatting, and if you didn’t have (the pricy) software made specifically for ios (and I didn’t own any Apple products until last year), the easiest thing to was to format it in a word document.
How hard could that be? Famous last words.
Because I wasn’t used to wirting in word, it never occured to me that my edits weren’t being saved. I think you can see where this is going. Sometime between finishing the book and uploading it to KDP, I closed the manuscript. And just like that, weeks of work and twenty chapters of edits vanished!
I’m not going to go into detail about the ensuing meltdown, the frantic calls to anyone I thought could help, or the cuss words and tears because once the big and not completely unwarranted crashout was over, I had to sit with my feelings. I had to think about what I was going to do. And, like I do with everything, I internalized it.
The voice in my head that frames every struggle in my life as something I’ve created or deserved went into overdrive. This wasn’t a technology snafu or a simple mistake. Nope that voice was calling me names.
“Stupid”.
“Idiot”.
“Dumbass”.
Then the voice got louder, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Maybe that voice was right. Maybe this was the universe trying to stop me from embarrassing myself.
I’m being vulnerable about that voice because I think a lot of us have it and we don't always call it out.
I rewrote the scenes. The second version was, if I'm being fair to myself, probably better. But I didn't know that when I was sitting there staring at the page, trying to reconstruct dialogue from memory. I just knew I had to keep going.
Psssst- If you're working on something right now: back up your files. Set up auto-sync. It takes ten minutes and it will save you from grief that your imposter syndrome will absolutely try to weaponize. Learn from my very specific and avoidable mistake.
I kept the costs for this book as low as I possibly could. I want to say that plainly, without hedging or embarrassment, because I think the self-publishing space can sometimes imply that there is a "real" way to do this and it involves a full professional team and a significant budget, and anything else is a lesser version.
I disagree.
I learned things I didn't know. I spent time where other people spend money — hours on formatting, on research, on iteration. I was selective about where I actually needed to spend, and I was scrappy everywhere else. And the book that came out of that process is real. It has an ISBN. It has a spine. It exists in the world in a way that no amount of self-doubt can undo.
Being resourceful is not the same as being less serious about your work. Doing it yourself, because that's what you have, is not a consolation prize.
And here’s the thing I have been building toward.
There is still a voice in the back of my head. It’s not as loud or dramatic as the one from the “have you saved your work” debacle, which is how we now refer to it in our house. It’s more like a refrigerator hum — constant, background, easy to stop consciously noticing until the room gets quiet.
It asks things like
Is this good enough?
Are you good enough?
Do you actually belong in the category of "author," or is that a word for other people?
It asks them most in the in-between moments — when I'm working on the second book, when someone tells me they're proud of me and I feel the warmth of that and simultaneously wonder if I've done enough to deserve it.
I published this book and the hum did not stop. I think there's a story we tell ourselves that once I do the thing, I’ll feel like I’ve arrived. It’s more complicated than that.
I worry about disappointing the people who are rooting for me. Friends who bought the book. Family members who have told other people about it with a pride in their voice that makes me tear up. I worry that book won't live up to their expectations. I worry that if by some miracle they don’t think I’ve wasted trees to publish the worst book ever and they actually enjoyed it, that book two will be the one the hate, and book three will will reveal that I’m a fraud.
I don't have a resolution for this.
What I have instead is my word of the year is Audacity.
And when I sat with what that word actually means to me, I kept coming back to the fact that it is not the absence of doubt. It's not confidence you were born with or borrowed or faked until it arrived. Audacity is the decision to do the big scary thing even while the voice is trying to talk you out of it.
So, I wrote a book.
I figured out the margins and formatting.
I rewrote the lost pages.
I met my deadline.
I pressed publish.
The hum is still there.
But, I'm writing book two anyway.
If you have a story you have been carrying around, a screenplay you’re writing, a business to launch, a creative project you’re starting and you’re wondering if it's good enough, wondering if you're good enough, I see you. I really do.
Keep going. Let the doubt come with you, because it's coming either way.
And then do it.
I'll be right here, figuring it out alongside you. 🐝
You can me chatting about here.
Merritt Ever After (Hudson Harbor, Book 1) is available now on Amazon in ebook and paperback and KU.