The following is a guest post by author Marlene M. Bell, whose book, A Hush At Midnight, I reviewed here.

I ended up becoming an independent author by accident. The best way to describe it is on a dare from my 4H club parents who asked for a non-fiction how-to book on raising sheep. If I had it to do over again, would I like to relive the adventure? Most days, a joyful yes. On rare days, not a chance.

Like most debut authors, my fiction journey started as a challenge to write a book and coax a Big 5 Publisher to show interest in the story. Whala! Instant success and notoriety would rise naturally as my name became a household word. Having zero literary training and not being much of a reader, the idea was absurd with a capital A. However, that didn’t stop me from trying my best for a short time with my first series book, Stolen Obsession.

The main problem with instant success involves the huge number of excellent independent authors putting out their own books, all with the same goals in mind; write a compelling query letter to literary agents specializing in your genre and wait for the acceptance letter’s arrival in the email inbox.
After receiving forty rejection letters and knowing my mortality, I decided to self-publish my work to the best of my abilities.

Publishing houses are not accepting many books these days according to my developmental editor who is also a literary agent. Mostly as a result of the talented independent authors who are covering the literary world with books that appeal to the masses, and they keep their book rights when publishing independently!

Buying fiction craft books and digging into what makes a good work of fiction is a road I traveled over two years while writing that first novel. It’s the best two years of homework I could’ve had as a new author with no practical experience and some semblance of a book to pitch. The original story changed five different times until I settled on one main genre and realized what the reader expected in that genre. Eight years into the process, book one in the Annalisse series went live online.

Let me tell you; writing independently isn’t for everyone. The down days for me are the occasional book review that hammers my abilities and bruises the ego. If you’re an author, we all experience these kinds of reviews. I try to take each thoughtful negative review and decipher if the criticism is warranted. I’ve found that most of them are. We’re all human and have our own writing styles that won’t necessarily appeal to every reader. I roll better these days among the occasional negative comment and instead, use them to better my writing.

If an author isn’t reading another author’s work, their own book is bound to suffer. The single most important takeaway from my experience as an indie author is not reading while writing. Reading other books keeps the writer’s block away and opens the flow of information from the mind to the page.

Thank you to Marlene M. Bell for sharing her thoughts on being an indie author. You can find more of my book reviews on my Bookstagram!