The Forest's Heir Blog Tour: Guest Post with Ley Hayley

 

Publishing is hard. Traditional or self-publishing, whichever route you go, there’s a lot of work involved. And I had to do a lot of work to get The Forest’s Heir out there and published.

   

I tried the traditional route first. I went looking for an agent, sending out query letters and doing a thousand different things to get people interested in the novel. There were a few people who were interested in reading a little bit more of the book, but no one was interested enough to take it on as a project. So I decided to do it myself.

I thought self-publishing would be easy. Ha! Boy was I wrong!

 

Self-publishing is like another job. It’s like being a writer, editor, graphic designer, publisher, and publicist all at the same time. I’m lucky that I have an amazing sister who helps out with a lot of the graphic design stuff. She designed my website and takes care of most of it for me. There’s little I have to do there, but the rest of the stuff is all on me. I have to edit my novels, format them for publishing, and do all the other work all on my own.

I published my first novel through self-publishing in August of last year. The second will come out in June of this year the same way. The third will be released this fall through self-publishing as well.

 

That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try to go the traditional route. I’m always sending out emails and queries to agents. But I’m not going to stop writing or publishing in the meantime. Maybe one day I’ll have my book in bookstores where there are five or six copies. Maybe one day I’ll be doing book signings across the country at the same time I’m doing blog tours. Who knows?

But I do know one thing. I wouldn’t change the way this has happened for the world. Because it has taught me a lot about myself and how dedicated I am to my writing. Everything that I have to do is time and energy consuming. But I love it. And that is why I do what I do. For the love of writing. The love of the written word. And the hope that my words will touch one reader, that they’ll mean something to one person out there somewhere. 

 

Thanks so much for visiting Ley! You can follow the rest of the blog tour at http://leyhayley.blogspot.com/