It’s beginning to feel real: my second novel, Unswerving, will be published next March by the University of Wisconsin Press (UWP). The publicity manager at the press is firming up bookstore readings, and the book is already listed as available for pre-order on Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. I’m both excited and nervous now that publication is only a few short months away. Promoting a new book takes a lot of time and energy. Will I be up for the task? Will anyone notice my book amongst the huge pile of other new releases? And will anyone like it? I will find out soon enough. 

Once again, it’s been a long arduous journey to get to this point. I published my first novel, When It’s Over, in 2017 with She Writes Press (SWP), and it was a wonderful experience. SWP produces high quality, professionally edited books with gorgeous covers that are distributed through traditional channels and are available in libraries throughout the country. SWP authors provide an incredible network of support, promoting each other’s books and providing advice on everything from marketing tips to the best way to create an audiobook. After years of trying to get published through more traditional channels, I was very grateful for the opportunity.

But SWP is a hybrid press, which means that I as the author had to front the costs of printing and publishing. In return, the royalty rate is much higher than with a traditional publisher, but even so, it’s hard for most authors to recover the cost of the investment. I knew that going in, and I have no regrets. When It’s Over is fiction, but it is based on my mother’s experience as a refugee from the Holocaust, and I wanted to honor and preserve her remarkable story. The novel has resonated with readers all over the world and was listed as a finalist for six different awards. It was recently made into an audiobook, and the narrator, the experienced British actress Jilly Bond, went out of her way to tell me how much she enjoyed it.

Hybrid presses are sometimes mis-characterized as “vanity presses,” as a way of dismissing the books as invalid and inferior. As Brooke Warner, the founder and publisher of She Writes, has pointed out, it’s only in publishing that an artistic creator is castigated for investing in her own work. No one calls the woman who starts her own ceramic studio a “vanity potter,” or the wood maker who opens a shop a “vanity carpenter.” But published books are expected to have gatekeepers to assure a certain level of quality.

And until recently these gatekeepers have been cis white men. With the consolidation of the traditional publishing houses into the “Big Five” and their imprints, the focus has increasingly been on making money by publishing works that conform to perceived trends or celebrity memoirs, rather than taking risks with unknown writers or unconventional topics. The marketplace is flooded with a million books each year. Are they all high quality? A quick examination will tell you: no. There’s a lot of trash out there. Gatekeeping isn’t necessarily working so well.

Yet when it came time for me to seek a publisher for my second novel, I wanted the validation that comes from someone else paying for it. The search wasn’t any easier the second time around, and I accumulated dozens of rejections. I was initially seeking an agent to represent the book, and I received several “full” requests—agents who responded to my query wanting to read the complete manuscript. But in the end none of them wanted it, often with completely conflicting feedback. One liked the characters and the voice but didn’t believe in the concept; another loved the concept but didn’t like the characters or the writing style. Which just goes to show: it’s so subjective.

I eventually decided to give up on finding an agent and seek small publishers and contests that accept direct submissions from authors. After a year of more rejections, racking up a total of fifty altogether, I finally got a maybe: Dennis Lloyd, the UWP fiction acquisition editor, liked it but suggested significant revisions. I knew there was no guarantee that the revised manuscript would be accepted, but most of his recommendations made sense to me. Two months later, I submitted a new version, and two months after that, heard that the Press Committee was recommending publication. Time to break open the champagne!

So, here we go. With the wonderful team at UWP behind me, Unswerving will be making its entrance into the world.