During my first major writers’ conference, I sat across from agent after agent, publisher after publisher. They all said the same thing:
“It’s great! But, rewrite it. Tie up every loose end. Make it standalone.”
No one would take a debut author’s five-book series. Too risky.
I walked out of that conference devastated. Maybe they were right. Maybe I’d wasted a year—and was already deep into Book Two—on something ‘unpublishable.’
For weeks, I let their voices drown out my own.
But here’s what I realized:
Those open loops they wanted me to cut? They weren’t mistakes. They were intentional. They were the heartbeat of the interconnected world I’d been building—the kind of immersive series I love to read; that book series lovers love to read.
That crushing moment became my pivot point.
It pushed me toward self-publishing—which has now grown into a true indie publishing entity with a full professional team. This way, I could tell the story exactly as I envisioned it. Long arcs. Unresolved questions that span books. Characters whose journeys don’t end neatly in three hundred pages.
Come on! You’ve turned a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, right? Drop it in the comments.
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