As I’ve mentioned before, part of the reason I embarked upon this self-publishing journey was because I hate rejection and therefore a major part of my reasoning was to avoid rejection, moreover, to place my fate in my own hands. As Janet Jackson said, “I want to be the one in control.” And yet I have found myself facing more rejection than I thought possible in a self-publishing pursuit in addition to feeling, in many ways, almost completely out of control.
The foundation of all this is that I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m doing it all by myself. I don’t know which one of those comes first – it’s my own version of the chicken or the egg. It’s like just when I think I have a good grasp of what I need to do or how much it’s going to cost, I learn something new. I learn a different way than what I previously discovered through research and reading, because that’s how I’m getting 99 percent of my information. I’m googling and youtubing shit. Then I start applying what I’ve learned, then all of a sudden, while I’m in the thick of it, I come across something that my research didn’t provide an answer to, so I google and youtube the new thing, only to find new information. Sigh, it’s exhausting.
A good example of this would be securing a book cover designer (at least I think this is a good example of what I was just describing, but I’m not sure because my mind is so scrambled with everything). So quick update: I do not have a book cover artist/designer. I’m back at square-fucking-one with that. The artist that I thought was a God-sent turns out to be sent to teach me a lesson, not to illustrate the cover of my book.
After interviewing what seems like hundreds of people (actually about 4 or 5) and pouring over countless resumes (my being extra version of about 10 or 12) I’d finally came across someone who actually blew me away with her presentation. I’d decided to solicit student graphic designers to do the cover of my book after not having luck with professionals (only to later reach out again to professionals, only to not have luck again). When it comes to art, one need not be a professional in order to deliver great work. As a matter of fact, some of my favorite professionals are the ones who were self-taught, who didn’t even go to school and just studied and mimicked the craft that they love on their own. I also thought it would be cool to have an unknown artist do my book cover, just like I’m an unknown author publishing a book. I liked the idea of having capable nonprofessionals coming together to make something great.
It made me think about the book of Nehemiah in the Bible, where Nehemiah gathered a bunch of people to rebuild a destroyed wall around the city of Jerusalem, I think it was. Anyway, the people that he got to build the wall were not professional builders, at least not most of them I don’t believe…read your Bible, it’s in there as Pastor Toure Roberts would say. Still, they did a great job in record time, even as they endured threats and taunting from their enemies. And the lesson I got from that is to work with people who are willing even if they are not the best abled, because willing people can become abled, but abled people are not always willing.
Since these students had little to no experience with book cover design, I asked each of the to do a rough sketch of my book cover. It was always exciting to see what they came up with. Most of them did two rough sketches based on the criteria that I gave them, which was great because I was only looking for one. But this girl gave like eight. Needless to say, I was wowed.
After extending an offer to someone before her, then later having to rescind it, it was like a breath of fresh air seeing all her sketches and the way she interpreted what I was requesting, especially since my instructions were purposely vague to try and better gauge how their artistry would align with what I was looking for.
So I hired her…
Okay, so I’m going to have to stop there. This story is going to be longer than I anticipated and instead of cutting it short I’m just going to string it along over to tomorrow.
That’s right, I’ll be back tomorrow to pick up where I left off. I wonder how many days it will take me to get this story out. And if you’re wondering what the Titanic has to do with all of this, just come back and keep reading. I’ve been watching Titanic documentaries on YouTube all weekend and I sometimes have this uncanny ability to find correlations in the most unlikely events.
To Be Continued…
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