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Jandalf the Green's Origin Story Part 2

Hi fellow travelers,

I’ve recently been informed in no uncertain terms that you did NOT appreciate being left on a cliffhanger with my message of May 17th, AD 2025 and that you would NOT appreciate being left to hang on said cliff any longer.

Therefore, I have returned with the next chapter of the story. The continuation of the mysterious tale of the three books that I published but hardly ever talk about.

If you have no idea what’s going on, start here:

Once you’re caught up, let’s venture on.

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*cue tense but refined piano music and some artistic shots of me running my hand along a wall*

June 16th, 2018.

I’m sitting in a leather chair in our house’s office room, sweating in the stuffy summer warmth and staring at a computer screen.

The red button says “publish.”

I call my mom and brother to watch the big moment. With as much flair as I can manage, I click the mouse. A success message appears on the screen.

And now it’s done! After all that work, all that waiting, all those questions, I’ve done it.

I’m a published author at age sixteen.

My book is available on Amazon. I’ve gotten my name out there. People will start buying my book, reading my book, and loving my book.

Right?

Frankly, though it feels great, and it’s a huge relief to have the project off my plate by now…this isn’t the publishing experience I’d originally aimed for.

And, little did I know at the time, it wouldn’t go at all like I expected.

To understand what happened here, once again, we’ll have to go back even further in time.

Once I finished drafting Mercy and her Shield, I immediately started looking into publishing options. It should be simple, right? All I needed to find was a publishing house that accepted this type of book. Maybe I’d get some rejections, but eventually I’d get that magic “yes.”

Well, simple got a lot less simple once I started doing some research. So many publishing houses required you to have something called a literary agent before you could even submit to them. (Which seemed snobbish to my fifteen-year-old perceptions, but it’s really not. It makes sense if you just, you know, understand the publishing industry.)

I obviously needed a Christian publisher for a book this allegorical, but not that many Christian publishers accepted fantasy. Most wanted a higher word count than my 43,000-ish. My book sat somewhere uncomfortably between Middle Grade (for 8-12-year-old readers) and YA (for 12-17-year-old readers).

The idea of submitting to dozens of long-shot publishers and getting back dozens of rejections sounded daunting and discouraging. And slow. After all, I’d made the goal of becoming a published author by age sixteen, and time was a-wasting.

Plus, I was learning just enough about publishing to be dangerous. I’d previously believed that self-publishing was too expensive to be a viable option for a teenager. But then I found out you could publish on Amazon for free. Immediately. Effortlessly.

Sidebar: there are very good reasons to self-publish to Amazon, and many authors are doing a fantastic job of it. “Free, fast, and easy” are not among those good reasons.

Well, I decided that traditional publishing sounded like way too much work and time. So my course was set: I would self-publish these books instead.

This was, after all, my special miracle child. It didn’t need a publishing house. It could succeed on the power of pure story and truth alone.

What followed was a rather agonizing year of learning that I didn’t know anything.

From getting reader feedback on Mercy and her Shield, I learned that my scenes were full of logical holes. From reading blogs on writing, I learned that I didn’t know what a story was made of or how one was built, only what it looked like on the outside. From community with other Christian writers, I learned that I was adding faith elements to the story in an on-the-nose way that would turn most readers off.

These lessons all helped me make the book MUCH better than it had been, but they also revealed that the story had been built with fundamental flaws that couldn’t just be edited out in a day.

Simultaneously, I was drafting book two: Grace and her Arrows. And it was not exactly a flow of exuberant discovery like Mercy had been. It felt like pulling teeth. My lack of a plan really kicked me in the backside as I hit Sequel Slump and couldn’t find my way out of it.

You’d think it would be impossible to get stuck in the middle of a plot basically retelling the Gospels, but you’d be wrong!

I drafted book three, Confidence and his Sword, as well, but knew I was going to basically rewrite the whole thing.

Then, once I “finished” editing Mercy (back when I was naming my files FINAL_2.5 or so), I had to format it for publication. If you don’t know what that means, neither did I. But basically, I had to make the words I’d written look good on a printed or ebook page.

And that printed OR ebook distinction is important, because I ended up doing completely separate formatting for the ebook and paperback versions of the book. I’m not saying that’s what I had to do, or should have done, but it was the only way I knew to force things to work, so it’s what I did.

Then there were the covers. The good news about the covers is that they were made by a generous and talented cousin once removed—for free. I still think she did great work on them and I’m pretty amazed my books ended up looking as good as they did. But having a cover design, believe it or not, does not translate to being able to format that image correctly to print on a physical book.

I say all that to say: I was in way over my head.

In the second half of 2017 and first half of 2018, there were moments when I legitimately thought, “I don’t think I can do this.”

(To which 23-year-old me responds: you WERE taking rather a lot upon yourself!)

But, by the time I was naming my files more like FINAL_11.71, I did it.

I uploaded the final files to Kindle Direct Publishing, and I hit the red button.

So there you go: Jandalf the Green’s secret confession. Books published on Amazon as a teenager.

And that’s when all my writing dreams came true…

Well, only some of them.

Because people did buy and read my book. An incredible number, really, all things considered. It speaks volumes about the generosity of my Bible Quizzing community and their willingness to give me a shot that I sold any books at all, and I’m so grateful for that.

As a result, I got to have a book signing as a 16-year-old.

More importantly, I had a tiny but enthusiastic reader base who told me with much squealing that they LOVED my book and they’d made me fan art and please please please could they marry this one character.

Honestly, after that, a writer can just die happy.

But the problem was, once my friends had bought the book, I realized I didn’t have anyone else to sell to. The magical discovery of my book that was supposed to occur through Amazon never did.

My mom tried to warn me. She said if I sold 100 copies, I’d be doing pretty well. I didn’t think I’d get on the New York Times Bestseller List (although part of me still believed I would), but 100 seemed like a crazy low number to aim for.

I did not sell 100 copies.

When I published Grace and her Arrows in 2019, I expected to do better this time around. But that’s because I was unaware of a rather obviously logical phenomenon: sequels always sell fewer copies than first books. It’s just nature—no one who hadn’t read book one was going to buy book two (unless they bought both at once, which happened a handful of times). So my pool of potential buyers for the sequel was incredibly small.

It turned out that, for all the things I’d learned, there was one major piece of authorhood I hadn’t figured out yet: what we call marketing. I knew how to write a book that people would enjoy, and I had even fumbled my way to a shaky knowledge of how to get a book formatted and printed.

But I didn’t know how to find readers beyond the people I was already in contact with.

Boxes of unsold books collected dust on my closet shelf.

By the end of 2019, I was feeling pretty discouraged. My miracle child book series had started to feel like all work and no play.

I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and grateful for everyone who enjoyed the books, and excited to complete the series by publishing Confidence and his Sword.

But after three years of work on this series, I was feeling stuck. I had to finish the series now, even if I’d rather work on other writing projects. I’d grown so much since January of 2017 that Mercy and her Shield already felt like little kid writing, but people would have to get through that to read the later, better books. I somehow had to learn marketing now, but everyone seemed to equate “marketing” with “social media” and I didn’t even want to be on social media.

But here’s possibly the worst thing of all that I learned in that time period of learning that I didn’t know anything:

If you publish a book that sells badly, the publishing industry will be aware of it, and that one book that failed to sell can keep you from getting future publishing deals.

That’s right. The miracle child series that was going to catapult me into the stratosphere of writerly joy and success…could now actually ruin my chances of moving forward as an author.

Perhaps you’re starting to imagine why I haven’t talked much about this series in recent years.

But you probably still haven’t started to imagine why I’m bringing it up again now…

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Tune in next time to find out: how did this series take on new life when the world shut down in 2020? How was the publication of book three completely different from the other two? And what surprising benefits came from hours wasted on formatting and stacks of unsold books?

Since I shared the last part of this story, some you have expressed interest in reading these mysterious ancient books. Which I think is really fun. If you’re serious about wanting to give this series a go, just shoot me an email, and I’ll find you a PDF of Mercy and her Shield to read for free.

You have to promise not to form expectations for my current writing based on what you read in Mercy, though. Remember I was fourteen when I came up with this idea! And this was long before I enlisted help from professional editors.

Did you learn anything new about publishing from this story? Do you have any favorite self-published books? Have you ever tried something that you thought was taking you straight toward your dreams until it took you on a detour instead?

Until our next adventure,

Jandalf the Green