First Breath

On Publishing, Fear, and Giving Stories a Life

I’ve been writing for a very long time. Wrote my first book in my mid-twenties. Maybe you did too—the book we laugh about now but learned something through the process of getting it out of us.

When I was first attempting to get published, I was snail-mailing sample-chapters. The waiting was intolerable. Back then, I was excited even when I got a rejection. To hear back at all made me feel like a real writer. Maybe I’d been taken seriously.

I don’t know why everyone else writes. I only know why I do. For me, it’s simple. I enjoy it. Like anyone, it makes me crazy sometimes, but I love it. I think I always will.

When you love to write, the publishing industry can be troubling because you write and write and write, and often, your work just sits there. For me, the entire point of writing is that another consciousness receives what I’ve created. A novel unread is incomplete. A memoir unread is incomplete. Not worthless, but incomplete.

I did write a book once, a memoir, and by the time I finished, I thought…

This book already did its job. It healed me. It helped me understand something.

Initially, it felt that whatever else happened was gravy. But that wasn’t entirely true. Yes, it had already done its job for me, but I also wanted it to do its job for someone else.

But that book was an outlier. While writing can be healing, that’s not always the whole story. I have a deeper desire for transmission. What I’ve learned, suffered, loved, lost, and discovered—I want it to land somewhere beyond myself.

This essay isn’t about abandoning traditional publishing. It’s about giving the stories we’re writing a life. Because they’ve already been brought into the world—we’ve written them. They’ve been born but still haven’t taken their first breath.

One of my fears as a writer has been that near the end of my life I’ll regret having placed all of my agency in the hands of traditional publishing. And if I’m being completely honest, the thing that most often keeps me from stepping out is fear and accountability.

Fear that I won’t be able to do it on my own. That I’ll fail miserably. (But honestly, that one’s easy. Ready for the second?)

Accountability.

How so? Because if traditional publishing never validates my work, I can blame them. If they never endorse my work, it looks like this:

“Publishers never chose me.”

But if I release it myself, it looks a little more like this:

“Readers never chose me.”

Do you hear the difference? The first is systemic, casually dismissed as the problem with today’s publishing. The second is personal. No buffer. No agent who effed things up. No editor to blame. No publishing company to accuse. If self-publishing fails, it means WE failed.

But I don’t think that’s true.

Let’s say you self-publish that book sitting on the shelf and only 50 people read it. My guess is the failure-fairy will be paying you a visit. But disappointment is different than failure. Honestly, it would only take 50 readers, along with a few “I cried during chapter 12” or “God, the way this is hitting” DMs or emails to remind us that the work we created wasn’t meaningless.

So, we must ask ourselves which outcome is worse? No readers at all? Or 50? In the first, your words never make it into the world. In the second, your work lived.

I want my remaining years as a writer to be spent in motion rather than in a queue. I’m exhausted by the bottleneck.

I've done it both ways. I've been traditionally published, then self-published. In fact, I currently have a book out on submission. I'm hopeful. But if it doesn't find a traditional home, it will still live.

I've often wondered which is the better path. But that's the wrong way of looking at it. Instead of good versus bad—traditional versus self-publishing—it’s better to think in terms of stewardship. Our responsibility is to make sure we do everything we can to help our stories breathe.

I want my babies to live. I want to do whatever I can to bring them into the world. So if the powers that be aren’t interested, maybe it’s time to stop letting them lie there in the infant warmer.

Spank their feet, watch them yawn wide, draw in their first breath, and scream into the world.

Give them a life.