I've resisted the idea of self-publishing a book-length manuscript for many years. Not out of any sense that traditional publishing is “better”—it's more that the process of self-publishing has always felt a bit overwhelming. What I've realized recently, though, is that I already use a lot of the same skills for my other projects, like producing the issues for After Happy Hour and publishing the prompt journals for Scribble House. This has brought me around to a new outlook on self-publishing my fiction. Yes, the process is a lot of work, but I'm slowly gaining confidence in my ability to do it, and am tentatively building toward self-publishing a book in the first half of 2026.
With this new goal on my radar, I've been doing a lot of research lately into all of those skills beyond just writing well that you need to be a successful self-published author, and figured it might be helpful for other folks contemplating this question. As I see it, there are four big-picture steps beyond the writing stage that each require their own sets of skills.
One of my biggest literary pet peeves is the mindset that genre and literary fiction are completely separate entities. What bugs me about this division most is that there's an implied hierarchy, where literary fiction is a higher form of art and all genre fiction is inherently worse—which simply isn't true. There are tons of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery stories that pay the same attention to craft and language as the works in the literary canon. On the other side, I'd also say that I've read my fair share of poorly written realistic stories.
The reality is that writing quality and plot-driven narratives are not mutually exclusive, and how literary something is has nothing to do with whether the story it tells is realistic or not. I think part of the problem here is that “literary” has become a kind of catch-all term, often used to refer to any realistic fiction that doesn't fit neatly into another category. A story isn't automatically literary just because it's a realistic story with low action, any more than a story is automatically not literary just because it has supernatural elements.
“Don't judge a book by its cover” is a nice thought, especially as it's applicable to, say, other people. When it comes to actual books, though, readers absolutely do judge books by their cover, and while this might be a hot take, I don't think that's a problem. I would argue it's the whole reason the cover exists in the first place. Not just to entice readers (though that's part of it) but also to inform them about the kind of story they're getting into and help them decide if it's something they'd enjoy reading.
This has become especially important in the modern era of publishing. It's a great thing that self-publishing has taken down some barriers that used to stop writers from sharing their work. That said, it also means readers can't count on a book being well-written or telling a complete, interesting story just because it's been put out into the world. These days, readers can't be sure whether a human even wrote the damn thing. If your book's cover is pixelated and grainy, or looks obviously AI generated, that doesn't inspire confidence in readers that what's inside will be worth their time.
Both of the collections I've put together so far have been linked, which made deciding what stories to include a bit easier. In fact, almost all the pieces in Cryptid Bits were written specifically for the chapbook, and the same was true for about half of the stories in Luck and Other Disasters. There was still some curation work that needed to happen—in both cases I wrote some stories that didn't end up in the final version, and it took a bit of fiddling to get the pieces I did include into the right order. But since each of those books occupies a self-contained world, with shared characters and settings, deciding which things fit into each book was pretty straightforward.
That's not the case for every short story collection. I knew that in an abstract, of course, and now I’m getting a first-hand lesson. A few months ago, I realized I have enough speculative short stories to put together a collection—way more than enough, actually, which is mostly a good problem to have. I have options and can mix-and-match things to find the exact right set of stories. But that’s also caused a bit of a delay in getting the manuscript assembled while I figure out how to even choose which ones belong together.
One of the great things about working remotely is that, when the weather is nice, I can spend my workday outside instead of cooped up in my office. My usual routine is to start on my back patio then venture in the afternoons to a coffee shop or park—or at least, that was the pattern the last couple of years, when Pittsburgh was spoiled by fairly dry summers. This year, it's been a rare day that's gone by without any kind of rain, and I've found my plans interrupted by the weather on an obnoxiously frequent basis.
Which got me thinking: If I'm annoyed by the unpredictability of weather, that's something I could use to annoy my characters, too. The weather is one of those pervasive background elements that I think I too often neglect in my stories, which is to my detriment because it can be a very useful tool. It can be a plot driver, a tone builder, or a way to show the passage of time and ground the reader in both the where and the when of a story. So I wrote myself a couple of weather-based prompt exercises to start me thinking about better ways to use it, and I figured I might as well share them in case they're helpful for other folks, too. (If you want to check out past writing prompt posts, you can see the full list of them here).
I can tell that a writing conference was worth the attendance when I leave feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the new info stuffed into my brain. Which was how I felt leaving the most recent In Your Write Mind workshop last weekend, enough so I needed a bit of time to let my mind settle before going back over my notes to pick out the gems.
This is probably going to be a slightly more random-feeling blog post than my usual because the topics covered at IYWM were pretty varied, and the notes I took on them were filtered through the lens of “shit I find neat and/or useful”. But I also figured I probably wouldn't be the only one to find said shit neat and/or useful, and putting them together into a blog post seemed like a useful way to trick myself into actually going through my notes before they just got shoved into a folder and forgotten about—so here we are. Read on for some random but hopefully beneficial advice. I also did a similar post for last year’s conference if you’re looking for more random writerly advice.
I recently finished watching the second season of Andor. If you don't know it, it's a TV show prequel to the Star Wars movie Rogue One, which takes place right before the events of A New Hope and focuses on the less-heralded members of the rebellion who put the pieces in place for Luke, Leia, Han, and crew to have their big victory. One of those characters is Cassian Andor, whose complete backstory is revealed over the two seasons of the show.
It took me a little bit to get into Andor, but once I did it's shot up my list of favorite Star Wars stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't watched it—but this post isn't about Andor as a show. I'm about to get way more pedantic and nerdy, because the first thing I thought of when I heard the name Cassian Andor was a different series I've loved since childhood: the Wheel of Time. In that world, Andor is a country, in fact the largest nation in the Wetlands and where most of the series' main characters were raised.
I always find it ironic that professional editing—an industry solely devoted to words and language—has so much confusing niche terminology. I say this as someone who edits professionally, both as a freelancer and through Scribble House. One person’s content editing might be another’s structural edits, and whether these are interchangeable or mean slightly different things usually depends on who you’re asking, too.
Part of the problem is that these terms aren’t standardized, and slightly different ones are often used depending on the context. What a fiction editor calls “line editing”, the editor of online news articles might call “copy editing”, and there’s similar overlap between terms like content editing, structural editing, and developmental editing.
