The future of publishing belongs to writers - not gatekeepers.

On a broken industry, narrow-minded editors and the swell of creatives leaving their agencies, reps and limiting beliefs behind.

Let’s start out with the truth, ya?

I didn’t want to self-publish my second book.

And why would I?

“Self-publishing” has always had some stank to it. To me, it reeked of second-best. I’d peruse the free vomit on Kindle and pray I’d never end up there, rejected by a “real” publisher and forced to pay my own way to print my words on a page. What a nightmare. What a shanda! It gave me chills!

So back in 2022, three-chapters in-hand, beaming like the proud, confident girl I’ve always been, I decided to test my worth as a first-time fiction writer by seeing if I could secure my favorite author’s agent and then sell my book to one of The Big Five. It was a little game I played: if I can get so-and-so’s agent to represent me, it means I’m worthy. It means I’ve made something valuable! I was eager to see what might happen, but more importantly, the approval-thirsty Loch Ness Monster that sloshes around in my stomach acid was excited to feast on the external validation, should it find me.

The approval-thirsty monster that lives inside me, and maybe us all.

And it did.

After signing all the paperwork, I charged through writing the rest of the book. My agents - killers in the industry with exceptional taste - were thrilled with the final result. Super optimistic. Ready to sell. My friends and early readers read through it in two-days tops - they couldn’t put it down. You can read all about that experience here, but in short, I started to fantasize about the competitive bids that would come in from various publishers, the illustrious launch to come, and a new, exciting phase of my career: fiction author!

But none of that happened.

Because the book didn’t sell.

😲

For a while, I blamed the market: it’s tough out there.

I blamed myself: no one loved the book enough to buy it. I’m not as talented as I thought.

But then, a few things happened that changed my entire perspective.

1. I went on vacation at the end of last year with 5 books on the Amazon best-seller list, and I’m sorry, but I read some of the worst f*cking slop of my life. And I say this as someone who cringes when anyone around me criticizes other people and their creative output. I am a staunch defender of “girls who take a risk and put themselves out there creatively” - and all people who do this, period! I feel genuinely uncomfortable criticizing other founders, authors, and writers because being vulnerable and building anything is hard work. But those 8 blistering days in Costa Rica offered a shocking reset. Perspective Shift #1: The Big Five are publishing some serious poo-poo-caca that does not think much of or expect much from the average reader. This does not align with how I feel about my reader, what I expect from my reader, or what I assume they want to and are capable of reading. For those who will read into this thinking I’m saying something I’m not, I’ll repeat myself: The Big Five are publishing some serious poo-poo-caca. SOME poo-poo-caca! I am not even talking about “trashy” books. I love trashy! I am talking about books in my category (thrillers) where the plot made no sense. This helped reinforce the confidence in my own plot and the twist at the end of my book, and the fact that I worked really hard to put my audience on a pedestal and do everything possible to give them a strong, earned payoff.

2. After hearing that my book didn’t sell, my book coach and dear friend

   Leigh Stein
   introduced me to the powerhouse that is Chelsea Fagan. Leigh sent me an interview she did with The Cut back in December 2024 that helped me reframe aspects of my experience. I learned that Chelsea - a wildly successful media entrepreneur who has sold over 400,000 copies of her traditionally-published non-fiction books - decided to publish a romance novel, A Perfect Vintage. She doesn’t go to into too much detail on the podcast, but it sounds as though those same publishers were only prepared to offer her a $25,000 advance for her fiction book, so she pulled it from consideration. As of the interview, she profited $60,000 from self-publishing instead, after spending five-figures on marketing the project herself. “At the end of the day, if you want to be compensated for your work, figure out the model that as an author gives you the most leverage - and optimize for that,” she says on the pod, “reject, if at all possible, the very common media dynamic of exchanging money for prestige…That feeling of ‘oh - a big publisher published my book and its in a bookstore…that concept of institutional validation and prestige is regularly used to underpay, exploit and not properly care for the people who are actually doing this labor and creating these works.” Perspective Shift #2: I am a business person, and I am not afraid to own and admit that I want to maximize my potential earnings on this project. This means I, like Chelsea, will also have to spend on making this project successful. I spent a low five-figures on marketing my first book, even with a traditional publisher’s support. If I am going to move forward and make The Raise happen, I have to heal the wound of not receiving institutional validation and prestige, and instead focus on making sure the book finds the right audience, gets lots of the right exposure, and pay for the people, channels and activities that will generate sales.

3. How to make the healing happen… how to make.. that healing.. happen…I started researching very famous people who were rejected by the Creative Industrial Complex and found myself consuming every single interview Chappell Roan has ever done, and paid close attention to how she talks about her pop star persona, first album and on-stage performance. I am enamored by her because she had to face so much rejection and, ostensibly, second-guessing herself, in order to become the Grammy’s Best New Artist of 2025 and our beloved earworm princess. How did she do it? Well - Kayleigh Rose Amstutz is the person, and Chappell Roan - the music, the makeup, the outfits, the moves, the attitude - is “The Project.” This detachment - this depersonalization of the art - should help any creative move on from rejection, like being dropped by a record label, in Chappell’s case, or being turned down by 30 fiction editors, in mine. The Raise is not me, and I am not it. My talents and skills are anchored to me knowing they exist, not the whims of external gatekeepers who have stakeholders to answers to, fears or insecurities I can’t see, or maybe - just maybe - an outdated sense of the world, and what an audience is ready to receive. Perspective Shift #3: If I believe this book - The Project - is compelling, twisty, shocking and propulsive in all the right ways, then it deserves to exist. The rejection I experience is not a rejection of my person or my skillset, but simply a rejection of this thing I made. And maybe, just maybe, I’m right. And they’re wrong.

This is the video I published to Instagram today announcing that I’m self-publishing my book. I had spent the larger part of 2023 sharing updates on my writing process and how excited I was to submit my final manuscript to my agents and publishers.

As I reviewed the editor feedback on The Raise, I grew more convinced of this. I won’t share literal quotes from the editors who didn’t snap it up (for legal and ethical reasons), but here’s the gist:

“Perfectly Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole-ish, absurdist, and escapist.”

“I was immediately pulled in by the high stakes and narrative momentum.”

“Keeps you on your toes, so relatable, so humorous and insanely energetic.”

“Has an almost Succession-like feel and does a deep exploration of personal identity, friendship and grief that feels truly authentic.”

“I devoured it.”

So what was the issue, you might ask?

There were many. Some editors had already bought “similar” books in the category. Others could not get enough buy-in from their leadership in-time to place a bid right before Thanksgiving. Others really, really liked it, but just… didn’t want to buy it. And that happens! I own and accept that, 100%.

But in many cases, what we heard over and over again was that these editors and their publishers did not know how to market my book.

The Raise is both a suspenseful murder mystery thriller and a coming-of-age story. The protagonist must figure out the truth about her best friend and business partner’s sudden death, and she goes through a personal transformation along the way. Wouldn’t you?

Time progressed after the Big Rejection and re-reading the editor feedback, and I found yet more evidence that these institutions - publishers, record labels, reps - may not be the definitive voice on what’s “good,” what audiences really want, and how to drive engagement.

There was ‘BRAT’ last summer, Charli XCX’s best-selling and most awarded album to-date, and, unsurprisingly, the one she had most creative control over. "We fully embraced her vision, her plan, her ideas and helped her bring BRAT to life," said Marisa Aron, Atlantic Records’ VP of Marketing. In this instance, the label ceded control to their artist, with Charli even leaking a marketing manifesto she wrote a year prior to BRAT’s world domination.

Charli knew better than her label.

And then we have Raye, a once-in-a-generation vocalist and performer who had everyone fixated at the Grammys earlier this month. She was initially signed to Polydor Records under the guise of becoming a solo artist, but was quickly pigeon-holed as a songwriter and featured vocalist. After seven long years, they refused to back her, believing for whatever reason that she wouldn’t break through. She had had enough, and in 2021, finally left to launch herself as an independent artist. In 2023, she released her first debut album to commercial and critical acclaim, even winning ‘British Album of the Year’ at the 2024 Brit Awards.

And so did Raye…

Then there’s the more personal example of my incredibly talented friend, who shall go unnamed, but was kept in a “creative box” by her management team for years on end. Her reps would tell her to dilute her style time and time again because it wasn’t “what clients wanted.” She would always oblige, slowly eroding that sparkle that made her special and kickstarted her career in the first place! Upon leaving that team, she’s been doing her own thing again, pursuing the work that sparks her curiosity and expands on her point of view. On the heels of that, she’s been rediscovered twice-over by more reputable and exciting partners who want her for her, and the financial setup is much more beneficial.

I’m not comparing my skills or eventual success as an author to Charli, or Raye or my genius friend, but I am comparing my mindset shift to the one they all had to make to succeed.

In every instance, they went from - “I need your resources, expertise, network, and muscle to help me succeed” to “I don’t need you, actually. I know what I’m doing.”

This, dear reader, is what it looks like to leave your limiting beliefs behind.

This is what it looks like to realize that you have everything you need to make your dreams a reality.

This is what it looks like to recognize that all along, you weren’t looking for their resources, expertise, network, and muscle - maybe you were just looking for their validation.

This is what it looks like to take full accountability for your outcomes and move from a shameful, victim mindset to one that feels abundant with possibility and ideas that move you forward.

And in deciding to self-publish and bring The Raise to market, I’ve developed two larger goals that have started to form really naturally for me.

1. De-stigmatize and elevate self-publishing.

“Self-publishing” is not second-best.

It is not a nightmare.

It is not a shanda!

I want to do for self-publishing what Substack has done for independent newsletter publishing / blogging. I feel this shift is imminent in our space. If we can all gather ‘round here and act like we’re doing something fundamentally more elevated and chic than what we were doing on Livejournal, Wordpress, Medium, Thought Catalog and good old listservs, then someone somewhere is going to build a self-publishing engine or a layer atop Amazon KPD that yassifies self-publishing for savvy authors with a built-in audience.

But it all starts with a larger cultural shift that stops treating self-publishing like a second-rate, back-up method of getting your book made, and more like the smart, profitable way that an author with marketing know-how and some creative vision brings a book to-market.

I want self-publishing to feel less like what your uncle did to print 67 copies of his sci-fi book about sentient teddy bears that took him 10 years to write, and more like how your favorite founder published 400 limited copies on her secrets for building a viral DTC community.

2. Inspire sensitive, validation-hungry and navel-gazey creatives to get the fuck over themselves and forge their own path.

Hi, yeah, that’s me. It took me a full year, lots of therapy, too many woo-woo self help books and lots of “the only way out is through”-type podcasts to arrive at this place of acceptance and motivation. Every little bit helped - that’s for sure - but I felt like no one was talking directly to me. I really wanted someone to look into my eyes and say: “Rejection happens to everyone, all the time. If you want to write fiction, if you want to pursue this career, you’re going to have to create more and more and more, and you’ll have to get used to this feeling. You’re not special, babe. No one’s going to ‘make’ your dreams happen. You have to process the rejection and move forward, on whatever path you think is right. But the answer is not in validation, or whining, or throwing yourself into unrelated work. The answer is in making. Your ego is too precious and it is 10000% going to prevent you from succeeding. Do you want that to be your story? That you were too precious in the end? Really?”

So I want to be that voice for you, if you’ll have me.

My final thoughts:

I want to acknowledge that I of course have the privilege of my Bulletin exit and consulting career to finance bringing my book to market, both the logistical pieces and the marketing expenses, which are not small sums by any means. I am grateful for the versions of me that hustled, and continue to hustle, to make my creative dreams come true. I am inspired by people I’ve studied and followed like Chappell, Doechii, Ava DuVernay and Stephen King who similarly self-funded their earliest projects. It’s a testament to the fact that if you want your dream, you make it happen.

Lastly and most importantly, I want to thank all of my current collaborators on The Raise, who are scheming and handling every aspect with me from social to cinematography (more on that to come) to marketing collateral to web development to design and more: Eva, Alison, Lila, Eurica, Caroline, Sofija - thank you for believing in me. They have no idea what’s coming 🩸.

Talk Soon,

Ali

Follow The Raise on Instagram.