We’re very excited with our decision to self-publish, but because we didn’t know we had other options when we started this process, we thought we had to try and find any agent and go the traditional publishing route. Because of this, some could say that we’ve wasted time and lost money by not publishing our first book sooner. By the time we’ve completed everything and published our book, it’ll be over two years since we started this endeavor. And while we endured a lot of heartache and struggles, we wouldn’t trade our experience for an earlier publication date, because we have learned so much during this process. So, this is for all you aspiring authors out there.  Learn from our mistakes, so you don’t have to waste time trying to find an agent or publishing house and you can move on to self-publishing your book right away. This is just our advice to you. In no way do we know everything.Part II – Knowing when you’re ready

It was a bit of a debate on whether to make this part one or part two. But, because punctuation, grammar, and spelling really could go under the subject of knowing when you’re ready, we decided to put that first and this second.

So, what do we mean by knowing when you’re ready? We’ll go back to when we first started querying agents. We did tons of research on the subject since we’d never queried before, and one of the most universal ideas we came across was “be ready.” We, like all new authors, were very confident that we were ready. However, we were also, like all new authors, impatient. The hardest part of this is you don’t know you weren’t ready until after the fact.

We wrote our first draft, revised & edited it, listened to beta readers, and revised & edited it some more before sending it to agents. Plus, there were two of us, and we’re both avid readers. How could we not be ready? Looking back now, it was almost comical how unready we were. Sad, but comical. Because there were so many things we didn’t know. We had our grammar and punctuation pretty much down (we even had someone help us with that), but there is so much more to writing than grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

During the coming weeks we’ll explore the things we learned, like how to show versus tell, use active voice instead of passive voice, vary sentence structure, and how to keep your back story in check, but today we just want to focus on how we came to learn this stuff. And we did this by thinking we were ready when we weren’t.

If you’re lucky, like us, you’ll receive some feedback on your query letter and sample pages. Most agents simply gave us form rejection letters and some didn’t even respond. But we were about a month into our first round of querying for the first time, when an intern at a particular agency took pity on us and pointed out a few frequent mistakes we made in our manuscript. It’s almost embarrassing to think about now, but it was definitely a good lesson. It also made us realize we were not as ready as we thought we were and, because of that, we lost out when agents asked for partials on that first round.

Don’t get us wrong, it can be very frustrating and make one feel dejected. Especially, when you learn there are all these “rules” or guidelines for writing novels. It can make you throw your hands up in the air. And while that’s the beauty of self-publishing, those guidelines are there to make your book better, not just to make life harder for you.

Like we mentioned, we’ll get into most of these guidelines, but did you know that one “rule” is to only have two exclamation points throughout one novel? Seems like so few, right? And a little extreme…until you pick up a book that has almost 500 and you either feel like characters are constantly yelling, or the exclamation point has lost all effectiveness. “Oh, the heroine is mad again? What else is new? Yawn.” This is only one example, and it might seem like a minor one, but it makes a difference.

Because we received this constructive criticism on our sample pages, not only did we do a deep edit, but we also signed up to do a webinar class, and hired someone to critique our first three chapters. And even though we didn’t agree with everything these people said, we learned how to make our novel better, and how to find a good balance between what to do and what not to do.

We also set aside our novel more than once, before picking it up again and going through to revise and edit. We once read the suggestion to put your novel in a drawer for at least two weeks before picking it up again and looking at it with fresh eyes. This can be very hard when all you want to do is query or publish your novel, but it is some very sound advice. There will be errors or confusions that your brain was “auto-correcting” that you would never catch without taking a break from your piece. You won’t believe how much better your book will be if you take your time.

Thankfully, (and a little unthankfully) we experienced all this. We’ve set aside our novel at least three times before picking it up to revise and edit it again. So while back when we started querying we thought we were ready, now we know we are ready, and that’s why we wouldn’t change our experience for anything.