Happy Birthday, Book of Secrets!

It was June 2019 when I launched my title “Book of Secrets” into the world as an indie publisher. Seems like only yesterday…

I’d had my original book out since 2010 but wasn’t indie published. That first book did a lot of lagging about and just not doing much.

And then, I met an indie author through Goodreads (Hiya, A.W. Exley!!!) around about March of 2018 (or thereabouts) and she pointed out a few things to me. It wasn’t until I met and began speaking to her that I began to realize “Hey, I can do this!”

With a renewed sense of purpose and with a steely determination to forge my own destiny, I wrested my rights back to the two book babies I’d created by 2018 and set out. Did I do everything perfect and in order?

(Cue maniacal laughter…)

In a word – NO.

But I learned from each and every wonky, out-of-order thing I didn’t get quite right, and I built upon them.

Things like cover revisions. Realizing that book one was a historical thriller, and book two (and the subsequent ones) were modern day and that that… wasn’t good. A myriad of things that I stumbled on or just flat got wrong.

But I look at each thing that I didn’t quite get right the first time, and each one of them I treasure when I look back and reflect, because they helped shape me as an author.

Now, three years on, I’m in the middle of writing my 16th book. Including mini box-sets, I will have 22 items out total, in two pen names, by year’s end. If someone had told me back in March of 2018 that this is where I’d be, I would have been skeptical.

I’m both humbled and honored to have such awesome reader fans. I’m both humbled and honored to have made some deep friendships in the author community that transcend physical distance and that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

To anyone out there who has that passion to write but hesitates – Don’t do that. Don’t hesitate.

Grab that dream; embrace it tightly. I wasted eight years believing that I wasn’t smart enough to be an author much less able to publish my work myself, and that no one would ever want to read anything I wrote.