Question: How do you write what people actually want to read?
I don’t. I write the stories that I want to read.
There is a saying that has always been going around the writing space for years: Write what you love and everything else will come. This statement is very much true considering I have been a self-published author since 2019. Before I managed to self-publish on my own, I went through what the professionals called the querying trenches: I was that author that was constantly writing queries and synopses to get an agent’s attention. I was the one who had to rewrite the entire book all over again just to make them pay attention to my work. No matter how much I tried, the traditional publishing market wasn’t having it.
I was told to write something else besides the books that I will eventually self-publish. The problem was, I became too invested in my characters and the world I had built up to leave it behind. This story needed to be told whether I liked it or not. It wasn’t up to them to tell me that I wasn’t able to publish it because ‘the market was dead.’
This was also the reason why I have a hard time on going back to traditional publishing. The constant rejections, the years of waiting for someone else to validate if your book is publishable or not, of not being able to have control over your own work…all of that plays a huge factor on whether I want to become a hybrid author or not.
I wanted to read about superhero hybrids who weren’t werewolves or vampires fighting criminals while finding their true soulmates in the process. I became a huge fan of the Lords of the Underworld series by Gena Showalter and wanted to write something similar. Instead of werewolves, I decided to do Orcas. Instead of it having just fantasy elements (which they do in the beginning of the series when they are created), I wanted to blend both fantasy and sci-fi together, making my work a genre blend, something in which the publishing industry wasn’t too fond of back in 2009.
So, I self-published it on Amazon. Got some sales. I went exclusive with my ebook on Amazon. I got very few page reads. I decided it was best for me to go wide, so I published my book with other online platforms. Do I regret my decision? No.
As of today, I have sold over 82 books since I first published the first book in the Truson S.E.T. Series on Amazon. I have also sold 30 books across multiple platforms on my Draft2Digitial page. My backlist is slowly growing.
My hope is that I will be able to sell 100 copies of my books across the board. That is my goal for the rest of this year. I am hoping that people will be able to find me, sign up for my email list, and eventually become a paying customer and fall in love with my world and my characters to where they won’t be able to sleep at night.
And I am hoping to do all of this without having to sign my rights away in order to do it.
If this post interests you and you want to find out more about me and my work, you can click on the links below for more info. Thanks.
Dominique Gibson
