Earlier this week, I self-published my first eBook on Amazon KDP titled The Woes of Weasley – The Diary of an Orange Cat. It’s a collection of short stories I’ve been writing since October 2018, with the main protagonist being my ginger cat, Weasley, who I adopted as a kitten in August 2016, just weeks before I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Weasley and I live in Diamond Harbour, a charming little village on Banks Peninsula, located in the South Island of New Zealand.
Each time I wrote a story, I uploaded it to my blog and shared it on the local Diamond Harbour Community page. The stories were well-received, likely because they featured local cats and often revolved around events happening in the village or major global happenings that were sparking conversation in the community.
About a year ago, I was preparing to post something new and realised I had twenty-four stories—enough to create a diary-style book, reminiscent of the Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsend (for those old enough to remember!). This idea sparked a new project. I unpublished Weasley’s stories from my blog and began editing them. Although the stories were already written, the editing process was longer and more tedious than expected, especially since I wanted to include the original pictures of the cats.
I discussed the project with my sister, Anne Jewitt, who had illustrated my first book, Maisey Morley’s First Christmas. I sent her photos of the cats, and while I worked on the stories, she started manipulating the images to match the action in the tales. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. Some pictures turned out fine, but others were less than ideal due to the poor quality of the original photos.
At the time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was gaining traction, but I wasn’t keen on using it. The writers’ strike was ongoing, and I felt an inherent mistrust of AI and its potentially negative impact on writers and their livelihoods. Nevertheless, we carried on doing what we were doing and once we had a decent manuscript, I began sending it out to potential publishers.
This was a difficult, soul-destroying process. Very few publishers accept unsolicited submissions, and literary agents are hard to come by in New Zealand. The few agents I found (about four I think) seemed to always be closed for submissions, so how a new writer can set about submitting “solicited” manuscripts is something of a mystery. You also have to factor in the fact you could be waiting a lifetime as many publishers take months to respond, if they respond at all. As Sam Neill aptly put it, “New Zealand can be a very discouraging place”. (Side note: I’m currently reading his book, Did I Ever Tell You This? and I highly recommend it!) I doubt he faced the same hurdles I did in getting his book published, but I won’t hold that against him!
Since my manuscript wasn’t met with the success I hoped for, I decided to self-publish The Woes of Weasley. My sister and I had a similar thoughts when trying to publish Maisey Morley’s First Christmas in mid-2021 and ditched it in favour of a so-called “hybrid” contract. (I’ll elaborate on hybrid publishing contracts in another post.) Fortunately, the self-publishing landscape has improved since then. I discovered a fantastic and reasonably priced software called Atticus, which simplifies creating professional print and eBooks.
Despite my initial reservations, I decided to give AI a try for the illustrations. Although I’m no professional, and I was only using a free platform, the few images I created using the text descriptions I provided turned out quite well. However, the AI images had a different look and feel compared to the original photos, so I ended up having to redo all the illustrations using AI.
This process took forever! Sometimes, the pictures were nearly perfect but had small details that weren’t quite right. In one instance, the cat in the image was wearing a collar (which I didn’t want) but when I instructed AI to generate the same image “without the collar”, it produced cats wearing the most elaborate collars I’ve ever seen! It was a reminder that AI works like the human brain in many ways. As many great philosophers have said throughout the years—you get what you think about, whether you want it or not. Now, whenever I start worrying about things that might go wrong, I picture those cats in their ridiculously ornate collars and tell myself that those sorts of thoughts will not help me get to where I want to be but only produce more of what I don’t want.
After completing the illustrations, I moved on to the final stage—proofreading. I’m fairly decent at proofreading others’ work, but I tend to miss silly errors in my own writing. I used ProWritingAid for some of the work, which was helpful, though it has a tendency to overuse commas and nitpick over things I don’t always agree with. Thankfully, a good friend agreed to proofread the manuscript and she did an excellent job and I uploaded it to KDP. Surprisingly, the process went smoothly, and within a few days, The Woes of Weasley was available on Amazon.
Now comes the part I find difficult: marketing. Over the years, I’ve been involved in marketing for retailers and companies that I’ve worked for, but when it comes to promoting myself, I hate it and I suspect I’m not the only writer to feel this feel this way. I recently saw an online post that captured this sentiment perfectly: “I would rather just be alone in my room and write. It took a lot of courage to even publish my work in the first place”.
That said, you don’t want to have gone through all that hard work of writing and self-publishing for nothing, so it’s a necessary a necessary evil. I have found AI to be a huge help with marketing tasks. I didn’t use it to create or edit the stories because I’d written them a long time before AI was even a thing, but it was incredibly useful for generating a things like a synopsis, blurb, and author bio and doing things like creating awareness on social media. It’s like having a personal marketing assistant to help do your trumpet blowing! I had to tone some of it down or I’d be at risk of sounding like an insufferable bighead, but as long as you provide clear, positive instructions (remembering to avoid my cat collar mistake), AI can be a fantastic tool for writers.