A Bestseller is Better Than an Orange Jumpsuit

Juliet Clark

2007 was a rough year. After 14 years of marriage, I decided it was time for a change and filed for divorce. For years, people complained about how vindictive my husband was, but I was just too close to see it. The minute I filed for divorce, I found out just how vindictive my husband was. The next nine years turned out to be one vindictive drama after another. A year into this experience, I was exhausted and feeling disempowered by the nonstop tug of war over kids, assets, and friends.

I had been in counseling, along with the kids, for an entire year trying to get everyone through the changes, demands, and drama when I decided that I needed to pursue a bucket list item that I had been thinking about for many years. As an avid reader of mystery novels, I had always wanted to write one. When I got out of college, I worked for a traditional publisher. I had a degree in horticulture and the publishing company I worked for had just purchased another publishing company that is well known for gardening books. I was inspired by the publicity meetings. This was back in the days when traditional publishers publicized their author’s books, unlike the industry today. From traditional publishing, I transitioned to a prestigious worldwide advertising firm and worked on a billion- dollar account. This deep dive into marketing would help me with my own business later on.

I sat down one afternoon and began writing my first novel. My rage was spilling out over the pages as I killed the character fashioned after my ex-husband with a baseball bat. It felt cathartic and I couldn’t stop. The plotting, scheming, and planning of his demise led to a tremendous amount of healing. It was like I was journaling to stay out of prison. I worked on that book for about three months before I sent it off to my editor on the project. I chose Stephen King’s first editor and was shocked when I had to print the manuscript and send it to him. No editing in a word doc for him. I got the full red-pen markup.

While the book was being edited, I started to look around for publishing options. I saw the success of some big authors who published through Kindle but didn’t feel like Amazon publishing was the right fit, so I contracted with a self-publishing company. The experience was underwhelming after

working in traditional publishing. In 2008, self- publishing was new and most of the new companies were subsidiaries of the traditional publishers. Traditional publishing had controlled the mass media market for so long, that they felt entitled to the monopoly of publishing. That meant that the new subsidiaries didn’t help authors much because they wanted to continue controlling the business.

One of the first red flags for me was the cover. Instead of a beautiful and thoughtful cover, they had me choose three images from a bank of photos and they slapped them on the cover. The cover of my first book is quite possibly the ugliest book cover to ever hit the market. The manuscript was a nightmare. To the untrained eye, it probably looked fine. However, I knew how a book should be set up so I was flabbergasted by the design. To add insult to injury, they marked the book up by double the print cost and took most of my meager royalties. I only sold 113 copies and I bet my relatives bought most of them.

Then came the marketing tools, which were not designed to sell books; they were designed to allow the publishing company to promote themselves. Case in point, they tried to sell me a release email for $2,000. For this investment, they would “promote” my book to their list of a million readers. Luckily, I was savvy enough to know that their promotion was an announcement to their email list that they had just published another book. The million subscribers were authors who were interested in publishing a book, not a million mystery enthusiasts, so I passed on the opportunity.

My experience was so awful that I decided I could do a better job at publishing my own book the next time around. I learned everything about cover design, formatting, building an author platform, and began publishing my own mystery novels. By the time I published my fourth book, I had already sold over twenty-five thousand copies of some relatively bad mystery novels. The gift was that several people in my hometown were part of a program to write books and noticed my publishing ability. These people started bringing me their books to publish and suddenly I had a thriving business.

There have always been challenges but my big take away from all of this is that I found my voice, healed, and have been able to transition to a profession I love. All of these were unexpected consequences of a bad divorce. The best part was that I was able to kill off the character of my pesky ex-husband, avoid an orange jumpsuit and a life in prison!

Juliet Clark is an eight- time author, speaker and podcaster who has spent the last twenty years helping authors, coaches, speakers, and small businesses all over the world build expert audiences.

To find out more about Juliet, please visit https:// superbrandpublishing.com/.