Going Indie: Month Five
May should be optional
In May, I celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary by taking the honeymoon my husband and I have been promising ourselves all these years. We had an eleven-day tour of central Ireland (coast to coast) and made the kinds of memories we’ll cherish all our lives.
Preparing for that trip, taking that trip, and recovering from the travel was most of the month, so that didn’t leave me much time to focus on my writing and publishing life. I did know that ahead of time, so I did my best to have everything in place and scheduled ahead so that none of the balls I was juggling would end up on the ground while my attention was focused elsewhere.
Still, a lot of things hit my inboxes while I was out and I came home to a big list of things to manage…and the bad news that my contract at my day job was not being renewed and I would be unemployed come the end of the month. As you can well imagine, that’s some panic-inducing news.
But, luckily? (is it lucky? is it healthy? I don’t know), I’m good at compartmentalizing, so I focused on knocking things off that to-do list and tying up loose ends at the day job before finishing my month with ConCarolinas, a fan convention in Charlotte, NC that is always one of the highlights of my writing year. I’m sure there will be fallout and June will be stressful as I take on job-hunting alongside the rest, but I do have a small cushion, so I’m not outright distraught yet.
(if you need a content strategist or UXC person, hit me up!)
So, ignoring all that for right now, how did self-publishing go in May?
Actually…really well! A lot of wheels I’d put in motion started fully spinning.
The second of the GenX romances, Acid Reign, dropped without a hitch on May 28, 2026 just as planned. She’s starting her adventure with seven pre-publication reviews thanks to NetGalley and ARC readers who signed up through my forms. All my early planning meant that I didn’t have anything to deal with on release day other than trying to find time to do a little promotion and let people know it was now available.
The audiobook for Not Too Late, narrated by Maggie Weber, launched on May 5. I hired Maggie at a rate-per-finished-hour, rather than royalty share, so there’s no record keeping and payments to work out down the road.
Maggie has tentatively agreed to take on the other two of these books this fall and I’m so thrilled about that. Since I do most of my own reading in audiobook form these days, it means a lot to me to have my work available in this format. It’s been one of my frustrations in traditional publishing that there was nothing I could really do to make that happen other than keep asking my publisher and hoping he’ll eventually release audiobook versions of my Menopausal Superhero novels.
Maggie did most of the work for this, but I did have to listen to and approve all the files, noting any needed corrections, and handle the uploading (I did ACX, non-exclusively, then used AuthorsRepublic to upload to other outlets). Luckily, Maggie has done this many times before, even if I’m new to it, so there was very little need for corrections and only a couple of chapters had to have levels adjusted and get re-uploaded.
I’ve also been working with Charlotte Chiew on mini-audiobooks for the stories in Stories from Shadow Hill. Shadow Hill is a collection of 13 weird suburban tales set in a neighborhood suspiciously like the one I actually live in. I began work on it as a collection in 2019, then set it aside unfinished when COVID hit and disrupted all our lives.
I picked it back up in 2025 and published it as my first indie project, mostly as a learning and experimentation tool (though it has really sold well at in-person events). Charlotte is recording some of the stories individually and we’re putting them up widely (all the outlets!) and also using them as promos and giveaways in our two businesses: Dangerous When Bored and Still Small Audio. I have plans to try my hand at being my own narrator on a few of them, too.
We released Beware Cheap Houses in January and Lawn Wars at the end of May. (If you’re a Spotify listener, I have some free codes for Beware Cheap Houses—hit it me up if you want one).
ACX, which is where you upload audiobooks for distribution on Amazon, Audible, and Apple, requires that there be a corresponding ebook up on Amazon for audiobooks, so I released Beware Cheap Houses and Lawn Wars as short story ebooks solely so I could “claim” them on ACX and then submit the audiobooks. Since these individual stories will not be available in print, I didn’t use my own ISBNs for these, but put them up without, using the Amazon-provided identifiers. It was very quick work, given that I had already formatted these stories as part of the Shadow Hill collection in Vellum. Really, I just had to import the appropriate section from that book into another Vellum file and voilá, a new ebook!
While I did work with a cover artist for the paperback collection, I made my own very simple covers for the individual stories using Canva. They are definitely not as good as the covers I hired artists to make, but they suffice given my goals for these stories. I guess if they ever really take off, I can consider investing in improved cover art at that point.
Other than that, I worked on that to-do list that accumulated while I was off gazing at the Cliff of Moher and wandering around the gorgeous ruins of Muckross Abbey.
Finish reading and providing comments and scoring for two novels for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star Awards (I’m a judge!)
Read one of my critique partner’s novels and provide beta feedback.
Process and and return edits on “What I Know Now” to Dead Fox Publishing. The story will appear in a Sapphic horror anthology on June 5, It Ends With Her.
Do a final proof of “I Never Saw my Father” for the Threads of Obsession charity horror anthology releasing in late June.
Prepare my part of the horror writing workshop I was teaching with a couple of my Horror Writers Association colleagues, then teach it.
Record panel discussions for WriteHive, an online writing conference in July that I’m a guest for.
Prepare for ConCarolinas (packing, making notes for panels).
Take care of paperwork for a couple of upcoming consignment arrangements for bookstores carrying my work
What I didn’t do in May was write a single word of new fiction. I journalled extensively on the trip to Ireland, edited and revised, and wrote promotional content, blogs, and articles, but my poor Gothic romance remains as neglected as the mansion she’s set in.
I guess in good news about my bad news, being unemployed starting next week might give me a little more time to devote to finishing that novel. After all, you can only sulk and apply for jobs so many hours a day.
So, here at the end of May, I’m feeling a little shell-shocked, but also very pleased with how much has already come to pass. There’s one more GenX romance coming out at the end of June, as well as those anthologies, and a short story coming out in Sally Port magazine, so a lot of my work is making out into the world and in front of readers. For now, I’ll continue to compartmentalize that panic and concentrate on the good things.