Finishing a Book Six Years in the Making
My labor of love is finally going to be in print
Nearly six years ago, I decided I was going to write a book.
In retrospect, the hubris in that declaration is a little overwhelming. It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of writing a book. It was just that I had this big idea: I was going to take all of my camping blog posts and go through photos and write about nearly every single camping adventure our family had ever had. I was going to use the book to convince people that they too should try camping with their families. It was going to be part memoir, part research, part how-to.
I bought Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods and national and state parks travel guides. I dug into my memories and I wrote and wrote during my summer break. When we went on our family vacation, I wrote out every detail of our travels, over 10,000 words from a single trip that wasn’t even that exciting, once everything was said and done.1
In the end, I finally realized it was all going to be too much.
By the time I returned to school, I had a sizable manuscript (over 50,000 words) that was just going nowhere. I desperately wanted to finish it, but life got in the way. I gave it to an initial beta reading team and they gave me some good feedback, but I wasn’t really ready to tackle that big of a project. The book meant something to me, but I was still trying to figure out what I wanted it to be.
A few months before I lost my job in early 2021, I joked that I needed a sabbatical so that I could finish this mammoth project that I had started over two years before. But when I found myself with all the time in the world to work on it, I just didn’t have it in me. Grief does a funny thing to us, and while I wrote a lot during the early months of 2021, I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable. I also was so afraid of another rejection that the thought of putting so much work into something that meant a lot to me and having no one want to read it was just too much.
So I tabled it, again. The switch flipped when I decided to self-publish my first book, a collection of essays from years of blogging. I suddenly learned a lot about the publishing options that were available to me. I didn’t have to depend on traditional publishing if I really wanted to get my memoir out into the world. I could start there, but I didn’t have to let rejection be the end of the road.
Last summer I dove into finishing another draft of my book and I watched it shift away from the everything book that I had initially believed I was writing. I wrote and revised thematic stories of our camping history, starting with the first camping trip that my husband Jeff and I took six months before we got married.
I made each chapter a weekly blog post for my paid subscribers and then I handed my beta draft over to four readers, trusting them to give me their honest feedback. They read and made comments and suggestions that I took to heart. They saw things that I couldn’t see and I trusted their instincts.
Over the next five months, my book transformed from a travelogue of adventures to a memoir that explores marriage, parenthood, and significant life changes, all through our shifting experiences as campers who started out in a tent, and have ended up in an RV.
I started with twenty-two chapters and ended with forty chapters and a prologue. Chapters got broken up and moved around and others were added as the book changed from thematic to (mostly) chronological.
The word count continues to hover between 78,000 and 79,000 words (there is still some minor revision coming), but while my starting and ending word counts are similar, I have cut and added a lot.
And most importantly, I am so proud of the book that it has become.
As I neared the completion of my third (?) draft, I considered multiple avenues for publication.2 I submitted a proposal to a publishing company that had published some camping/travel works, hoping they might be interested. I never heard back. I submitted to multiple hybrid publishing companies and three were interested, but when I looked at the price tags for the publishing services they offered, I decided I just couldn’t justify spending that much of my own money, even if it meant that I didn’t have to take care of the most difficult parts of publishing.
I finally decided to continue down the indie publishing route, only this time I would take the lessons that I learned from the first time and do it so much better. I contacted friends about cover design and editing and I worked on a plan for paying them. Following the advice of fellow Substacker
, I started planning a Kickstarter campaign to pay for the pre-publishing work that needs to be done and to set me up with the resources I need for a successful summer launch.3 I set up a BookFunnel account so that I could more easily send out electronic Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to my current audience and also get my first book in front of more people to expand my audience. I joined giveaways through The Storygraph and Crave Books in an effort to increase my email list and get my writing and the news of my new book out to more people outside of my social media circles.How can you help?
Go over to my Kickstarter campaign and click on “Notify me on launch.” This does not lock you into supporting the campaign, but it does guarantee that you will get real-time news about the campaign and it will help show that people are interested. I will also send an email to all of my subscribers with additional updates when it goes live.
Share the campaign with any of your friends and family who you think might be interested in the project. If you still use Facebook, you can also join the online event that I created and share it with others.
What’s coming next?
I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t already thinking about what is coming up next. I’m ready for this project to be out into the world because I want people to finally be able to read it. And I’m ready to now work on a book of hope that compiles years of essays and blog posts about faith, politics, and community (with planned publication in 2025). While I’m putting that book together, I plan to continue monthly work digging into the hard emotional work of workshopping the story of my life as a churchworker’s kid who became a churchworker. I will also continue my series on what it was like to be a Midwesterner living in Texas. We’ll see which of those two projects get completed first, ha!
I’ve also started writing short stories. My subscribers got a copy of my first short story via email this past week. I will send out monthly emails to my subscribers with free links to new short stories as they are completed. You can read the first two by clicking the links below.
Support my writing
While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you would like to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.
You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.
If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.
And thank you for supporting my journey 💗
I eventually broke those 10,000 words into seven blog posts that I put on my WordPress site. You can find the first one here.
Honestly, this book has transformed so many times that I’m not even sure how many drafts I’ve written.
Seriously, if you are an indie writer, you NEED to subscribe to his Substack. His advice is gold.
Awesome, awesome post, Sarah! 🙌
Awesome!!!