Our friends over at Kirkus recently announced the launch of a writing and publishing blog that lends practical advice from experts and “How I Did It” stories from some of the nation’s most successful authors and self-publishers.

This week advice comes from Tracey Garvis Graves, who until recently–when she signed with a traditional publisher–was a fixture at the top of IR’s bestseller list.

One of the questions I’m asked the most is, “How did you sell 365,000 copies of your self-published debut novel On the Island?” There’s no short answer, but if I had to sum up my success I’d say that I owe it to the readers who embraced my story and shared their recommendations with friends, family members and, sometimes, total strangers. No marketing campaign in the world can compete with the power of a large number of positive, word-of-mouth recommendations. 

When I completed On the Island a year ago, all I wanted was to obtain agent representation. I drafted my query letter and polished it to a high sheen. I sent out the first batch of queries and rejections started rolling in an hour later. In hindsight, I was probably naïve in thinking that anyone would take a chance on a debut novel that didn’t fit neatly into a single genre and had, quite frankly, a somewhat risky storyline. This realization, however, didn’t make the rejections any less heartbreaking.

My husband and my critique partner urged me to consider self-publishing. I didn’t want to. I thought it meant that my book wasn’t good enough. That I’d failed as a writer. People looked down upon self-published authors and were quite vocal about everything they were doing wrong: bad covers, no editing, horrible plots with holes you could drive a truck through. I resisted. Finally, I decided that I had absolutely nothing to lose by self-publishing, and I wholeheartedly disagreed with the mindset that a writer who fails to gain agent representation must shove their novel in a drawer, never letting it see the light of day again.

Read the entire post with Tracey Garvis Graves  here.

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Tracey Garvis Graves lives in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa, with her husband, two children and hyper dog Chloe. Published in July by Plume, On the Island is her first novel. She loves hearing from her fans and can be found at Twitter @tgarvisgraves and on Facebook. Author photo by Ryan Towe.