So… I Actually Published the Thing

A few months ago, I wrote my first blog post called So… Apparently I’m an Author Now.

At the time, Stoneveil: Shadows Under Ice was finished and sitting in the inboxes of agents and publishers. I had no idea what was going to happen with it. Maybe someone would take a chance on it. Maybe I’d spend the next year collecting rejection emails. Maybe it would just sit on my computer while I moved on to the next idea.

Well…

I published the thing and Stoneveil: Shadows Under Ice is officially out in the world. And getting from “The End” to an actual book turned out to be an entirely different adventure.

Apparently finishing the book was the easy part... well, maybe not easy. Writing a novel is still writing a novel, but I definitely underestimated everything that comes afterward.

Formatting. Covers. ISBNs. Paperback versus hardcover. Amazon. IngramSpark. Goodreads. Author pages. Websites. Pricing. Advertising. Trying to figure out why something looks perfect on my computer and completely different five minutes later somewhere else. At some point I realized that writing the murder mystery might have been less complicated than publishing it.

I originally wanted to pursue traditional publishing with Stoneveil. I queried agents and gave that route a shot. But eventually I had to decide what I actually wanted. And what I wanted was for people to be able to read the story so I stopped waiting.

One of the biggest confidence boosts came when the prologue placed in the Top 1% of nearly 15,000 entries in ProWritingAid’s Novel Beginnings competition. I wrote about that here before, and at the time I said it made me feel like maybe this story actually had legs.

Apparently those legs walked it all the way onto Amazon.

Seeing the finished book was different than I expected. I’ve written stories before, but Stoneveil felt different. This was the book where I felt like I was beginning to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be.

A small mountain town. A body hidden by winter. A murder that wasn’t supposed to be discovered until the snow decided otherwise. And Galen Voss. A man who moved to Stoneveil partly because he wanted to leave this kind of work behind, only to discover that murder apparently didn’t get the memo.

While all of this was happening, I started working on the next Stoneveil story.

Turns out I wasn’t ready to leave the town—or the people in it. I have plans for Stoneveil that extend well beyond the first book. Different seasons. Different mysteries. More of the town’s history. More of Galen, Ruiz, Barnes, Felix, and the other people who live there. Some things introduced in Shadows Under Ice aren’t necessarily finished just because the murder is solved. That’s about as much as I’m going to say about that. I’ve learned that talking about an unfinished mystery is basically an elaborate exercise in trying not to accidentally spoil your own books.

For most of the writing process, these characters existed in my head and on my computer. I knew what happened. I knew who was lying. I knew where the clues were. I knew which details mattered and which ones I hoped would send readers in completely the wrong direction. Now I don’t control that part anymore. Someone can pick up the book, meet Galen for the first time, form their own opinions about everyone in Stoneveil, and try to solve Cody Rennick’s murder before Galen does, and that's probably the coolest part of all of this.

I’m still learning as I go. I’m still figuring out publishing, marketing, and whatever else I’m apparently supposed to know now that I decided to put books into the world. But Stoneveil: Shadows Under Ice exists. People can read it.

And somewhere along the way, “I think I might like writing mysteries” turned into the beginning of a mystery series.