RACHEL E. BROOKER

It has been too long since I updated my website, and there have been many reasons for that. The biggest one is the fact that after 100 literary agent rejections over the course of 16 years, I decided to self publish ‘Will Worthington and The Black Rainbow.’

Let’s go back to November 2023. I had been very dejected and upset, not wanting to write for the best part of the year because of the disappointment at all the rejections. In fact, all I could seem to produce were little poems, and the odd slice of Harry Potter fanfiction. I worried for some time that this meant my passion had faded. It’s only recently that I came to the realisation which made a lot more sense… Due to my book not being taken up by a literary agent, I personally felt like a failure…

For years, I had considered traditional publication to be the only route to success. This was a naïve outlook. There are so many authors out there who go it alone, and go on to be incredible published writers. If I could tell my younger self some advice, it would be this: “Don’t judge the quality of your writing based on getting it traditionally published… it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just going in another direction…”

Quickly, I set my heart on self publishing (well, actually, it took a while for me to accept that it could be a good thing for me), but once I had embarked on the idea, I was off… writing notes, collecting advice from self published friends who I had known a long time, and working out what the first steps were towards getting ‘Will Worthington and The Black Rainbow’ into print. In the end, I voted on IngramSpark as the place to do this. Naturally, I asked for my Dad’s help too. He has worked with computers for 27 years, so he knows his stuff! However, Affinity Publisher 2 and the world of self publishing was just as new to him as it was to me.

At the end of 2023, I read through the book and hired a proofreader to highlight anything that needed to be amended. At the time, I expected to go over a bit again, but it never occurred to me that I would be there for months (and I mean months) re-writing sections and tweaking chapters. This was not all down to the proofreader, either. I saw a lot that needed to be changed, and so, well into the beginning of 2024, I was there, editing and re-editing, reading back, reading aloud, and adding new things that were a thousand times better than the original versions.

Dad and I then looked at the grammar. We learnt all about phrases like ‘breaking spaces’ and the word ‘elipses’. We changed the page numbers. We counted them. We figured out layout together… something about ‘master pages…’ I’m not joking when I liken the whole experience to a course you would take at university. For hours, we trawled through YouTube video tutorials. There were times where I wanted to pull my hair out (the days when I would get rid of punctuation that wasn’t meant to be there or go through each chapter looking at how to delete unwanted spaces in a sentence.)

Sometimes, it was very hard. There were moments where I thought ‘Is this going to work?’ But through my persistence, and Dad’s dedication, we have nearly come to the end of the process. In between all of this, a fabulous cover designer was recommended to me, and over about a month, the final look at the cover, and images and promotion for social media was created.

When am I going to release it? This is the big question. Half of me wants to bring my book out on Halloween, because that would be so cool, and yet another half of me thinks I should get some ARCS (Advanced Reader Copies) before publishing the book mid November. No. That would be the right thing, but can I wait that long? I think my book deserves it. If I’ve waited this long, it would be a real shame to speed everything up just because I’m impatient! (Update as of August: I am giving out ARCS before releasing the book officially. I will be giving free copies to the cafes I’ve spent hours in, my local bookshop, the other shops I frequently visit, and a school that has loved the first five chapters which I sent to them. I’ll also be sending copies to some of my favourite authors who have inspired me for years.)

In the final stages, Dad and I were figuring out how to add authentic looking graphics for chapters… ie there was a diagram, and we added graph paper. There were plaques. We found licensed images that looked as though they could be from a sign etc. The fonts were tricky as well. It wasn’t just a case of getting the right font for the text but getting the right fit for the text on images. Everything needed to be really professional, and it was worth spending the time! I also flicked though middle grade books which had been traditionally published to get a feel of what publishers are doing and how they are doing it. This was also something I did when we were researching the book size or ‘trim size’ as is the term for it…

The last things we have to do? Edit the front pages. These are the pages with information about the publisher, or anything else I want to add that isn’t the acknowledgements. Another task to do is completely fill in the online forms for IngramSpark.

Did I think it would take this long? No way. I hoped it would be just one more read of the book, upload the book, publish it. There was a lot more to it than that. As with anything you want, you have to spend the time on it. It’s odd to think that only a few weeks back, I had just ordered my ISBN codes for both my printed book and the e book version. That was the moment when I thought of myself as a real author.

It’s probably only two or three weeks away from being published, and I’m so nervous. I did give my friends a little pre-read of the first five chapters, but this isn’t just me ‘playing’ at the idea of being an author anymore. I want to make this my full time career.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a quote that I made up … “Those who give up will absolutely fail. Those who fail to give up will absolutely succeed.”

R.E. Brooker