After I wrote the first four novels, after I’d committed to this one, after the years of writing and revising, authenticity edits and developmental edits, after proofreading and proofreading again. After I finally decide it’s perfect [it isn’t], there is the next step. Next I submit to agents or small presses who will look at unagented novels. That does not go well for my book.

Suppose I decide to self-publish? It was always an option. The publishers who would do so much of the work in design and promotion were well out of my budget. Eventually I found a printer who works with small presses and decided to trust them. Books are out and in the mail, with 50 of 100 gone. The process took a while.

Find a printer who can do perfect bound books. There are plenty to choose from—you’ll be surprised. Do a search, ask around, visit the websites of credible printers, and use the budget calculators many offer to estimate what it will cost to print your book. But wait! They will ask what size book you want and how many pages will it have? Color inside? Cover paper weight and interior paper weight? Give some presses all this detail and they can spit back a cost. Do you need editing (you really do), cover and interior design (of course), ISBN and copyright, (oh, dear) or help with promotion (worse)? A simple print run might only cost a thousand for a hundred books, assuming all the writing AND designing is done. One press with a decent reputation has a starting fee of $12,000 to take your completed manuscript and push it all the way through to publishable, as a start. I’ve been to launches of such novels, and I cannot afford that. A writer wrote an essay about spending $20k on publicity.

I had a cover. I had designed more than a hundred covers just for this book. Eventually I had one that stuck. It’s worth mentioning that someone else likely would have done a better job on my cover but no one did. I love my cover, but I am not objective about my own work. I have, however, designed many books for other people and it was a fun rather than an intimidating task for me.

I found 191 cover designs using cave paintings and my own photos, a contemporary painting by Ruth Hunter [upper left, used with permission], art by Georgia O’Keefe and Klimt and other paintings and illustrations by women in the public domain. Many of the cover designs labeled “BEST.” I confess to a particular fondness for those dead birds painted by a famous French naturalist, a woman of the nineteenth century. Dead birds didn’t work for this book though my readers might wonder.

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Once I had what I considered to be a complete manuscript, and after I butchered it to its current length, the smart thing to do would be to hand it over for another edit. I’ve done final editing and proofreading for others, but it’s notoriously difficult to do that for yourself. Even so, I didn’t have anyone eager to do it and didn’t want to burden people I might have asked. I couldn’t afford to hire an editor, so I went directly to book design, which was the fun part.

Along the way, I learned how to apply for an ISBN, registered my domain, and began displaying the logo of my new press, &PRIDE. If all goes swimmingly, I will be looking next year for a 2028 publication written by someone else.

So far, the process has been both interesting and challenging, even for someone with some publication experience, a design background, and the capacity for spending hundreds of unpaid hours staring at a computer screen. I tested out shipping and decided to make the shippers—everything else dented corners. I have newfound appreciation for packing and paying postage—shipping books, even at “print media” rates was costly. (Let me never complain again. Shipping is the worst and I see now why people choose presses that will print and ship on demand.) Five dollars was fine for packing and U.S. postage, but didn’t come close to what I spent shipping outside the country. I swear I will never complain about “shipping and handling” costs ever again.

The past months have been a haze of activity, from clearing out, cleaning, repairing, and painting our tiny rental (Yeah! We’re on track to paying our property taxes!) to making the expensive decision about publishing my first novel. A lot of work, but getting through both these processes has been deeply satisfying.

My novel will not be sold through Amazon, and Goodreads won’t list it. If I sell all copies from this printing, I’ll make further corrections and reprint, and if I receive any reviews worth blurbing, I will add them too.

I am deeply grateful for the support of writers and readers and for every pre-order, especially from fellow MFA students and my former students, Allison to Zach! Thank you!

No best seller, no fame or fortune necessary. The pleasure is holding a beautiful book in my hands. That’s got to be enough.