The Rise of Self-Publishing: My Journey

Upon getting some rejections and no responses from submitting “What Do We Need Neurotypicals For” as my memoir, I started thinking of all those other novels sitting inside my flash drives collecting dust. I decided to self publish through KDP. Yup, Kindle. I bought the How-To book and I was finally liberated from the long waiting game within publish industry. No more “Lower word count, don't start it like that, it needs a ghostwriter.” Those days are over. Many people are also self-publishing. This time I am in charge. So I decided to publish my dark hero and my heroine from my second novel “Bad Fuel.” Yes, I’m not changing the tasteless title to go with it. And I added this introduction in the beginning of my ebook which I will share with you all here: Back in February of 2003, the Anti-hero trend was hot and new starting with the HBO TV Show “The Sopranos.” This was when I began this writing this novel using the hero as an anti-form which was slammed and ostracized by many authors and writers upon joining my chapter in Romance Writers of America. Meanwhile, more TV shows were raining with anti-heroes and anti-heroines such as “Board

walk Empire”, “Mad Men”, “Breaking Bad”, and “Nurse Jackie.” The romance publishing industry was not catching on yet, hence, sneered and slammed my novel “Bad Fuel”, and yes, the title made Kensington Books Editor shrivel her nose while making a crude joke about such a title back in 2005 during a query letter workshop. This novel was impossible for editors, agents, and publishers to even want to look at hence, never gave me the time of day to want to publish. Why? Because the bad boy Ivan Milanovich had no morally redeeming qualities in their romantic world…but like fictional “Tony Soprano”, Ivan does possess human feelings with a bad childhood past that made him the man he became. So, thanks to the God-sent growing industry of self-publishing, I decided to keep the hero and the “One-dimensional” (As critiques labeled her) heroine as their original human form. I hope after the age of dark heroes and heroines, readers will open their eyes to see the light on my flawed characters of this book with a tasteless title to go with it! P.S. By the way, this is the September 2005 edition so technology is dated to that time.